What a great column:

Here’s what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don’t listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.

…

Not everything should be interactive. A piece of work that stands on its own, without explanation or defense, takes on its own power. If Martin Luther put his 95 Theses on the wall and then all the townsfolk sent him their comments, and he had to write back to all of them and clarify what he meant, some of the theses would have gotten all watered down and there never would have been a Diet of Worms. And then, for the rest of history, elementary school students learning about the Reformation would have nothing to make fun of. You can see how dangerous this all is.

Not everything should be interactive.

Someone actually had the audacity to say it.

Imagine.

My mom’s finally upgrading her original Bondi Blue iMac from 1998. OK, I’m actually upgrading it for her, which is kind of fun on some level, I guess. I get to configure a whole new computer without having to pay for it. And I get to move her off AOL once and for all, which is a huge bonus.

It was strangely surreal walking around the Apple store with my mom. There were no Mac Minis in stock locally, so we had to go to The Streets at Southpoint in Durham yesterday. It’s unfortunate that most Apple stores are in such repulsive, icky malls. The hipster fashion victim factor in this particular mall is way off the chart.

On the geeky homefront, I also finally got my phono preamp today, so I can connect the turntable to the computer and start digitizing vinyl. We’d been doing a bit of that before, but with a far more cumbersome system involving a component DVD recorder and a mini-disk unit. This way will be better and easier, and soon my considerable collection of 1980s New Wave and indy rock (not to mention obscure Top 40) will be comfortably enclosed in an iTunes wrapper.

FYI, right now I’m working on “Vertical” by Horizontal Brian.

Also, thanks to a really long set of AV cables (a Christmas present from my hubby), I now have my DVR connected directly to the computer for video input and DVD burning.

I may never leave my office again.

Random Thursday stuff:

• Why yes, I do find it alittle ironic that the “The Streets of San Francisco”, which was produced by Warner Bros. and aired on ABC, is being released on DVD under the Paramount and CBS labels. But I’m glad it’s happening, anyway.
• I’m very much hoping my new hometown has the good sense to reject those special delusions of grandeur that only a publicly-financed stadium built on the site of a bulldozed, poor, black neighborhood can provide. Is it 1957 again? Has Robert Moses risen from the grave and landed in Winston-Salem? God, I hope not.
• In case you haven’t visited lately, Groceteria now features a new photo journal on the front page. I’ve been pretty good about keeping it up so far.
• Also, someone has a whole new site. He writes about ballparks there too. I’ve limited my remarks to a certain message board where I should probably know better than to try challenging people’s definitions of “urban”.

Yer Humble Host at the Kopper Kitchen in downtown Winston-Salem Friday morning.

You can pretty much tell just from the color of the booths that the place is pretty close to my idea of heaven. It’s one of those ancient eateries in a slightly run-down low-rise building on the periphery of downtown. Most of today’s planners and downtown boosters would want to raze the place and replace it with some sort of shiny, overplanned “mixed-use” complex (with loft condos, of course) because that would, by definition, be more “urban”, right?

Yeah. Right.

After thirteen years on the other end of the country, it’s sometimes strange being so close to home again. There are small and inisgnificant aspects, like the fact that my mom tells me about sales at stores I can actually go to, and that we discuss local news stories on the same channels and in the same newspapers. There’s also the disorientation that comes when I realize that I’m living in the same general area where I spent so much of my early life, but not in the same city; my hometown is thirty miles away, and it still feels like a bit of a road trip to visit it.

The thing that’s hardest to get used to, though, is the fact that family crises have suddenly become much less abstract and much closer to my everyday exisitance. When a close relative is sick or has a problem, I’m expected — not just by my family, but by my own conscience — to be there and offer help when I can. It’s inconvenient and unpleasant, but it has to be done. That’s how families work; I know that if I ever have issues myself or with my own parents, my extended family will help me out as well.

Right now, it’s an uncle who had a stroke last week and clearly can’t take care of himself, but seems determined to do so anyway. It’s an issue that’s going to make my parents’ lives miserable for weeks and months to come. My uncle’s illness and my mom’s new computer have taken up a lot of my time over the past two weeks. But I guess it’s an investment; my turn for help might be next.

It was a lot easier being 3000 miles away, to be sure. All in all, though, I’m still glad to be home. And at least I’m far enough away that I’m not usually the first one called in a crisis.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you happy after a long day dealing with family crises, things like discovering that Boomerang is running Wait Till Your Father Gets Home reruns in the middle of the night. Or realizing that the microphone input on your G5 actually accepts a line-level input as well, thus sparing you one of the more time-consuming detours in your vinyl digitizing journey.

Only two and a half months after the fact, here’s the exciting story of our recent road trip to Chicago, Toronto, and Detroit.

Hillsborough Street, Raleigh NC: Among the last of a dying breed…

If all Krispy Kreme stores still looked like this, the company wouldn’t be having so much trouble now…

It was eleven years ago today that I began doing the website that more or less became this one.

I’ve been doing this for more than a quarter of my life, and, depending on your definition, for more than half my adult life.

That’s a mildly disturbing thought. I can’t say for certain that I even remember how not to do it anymore.

Frankly, this adulthood thing is no longer amusing me, and I’d like to reconsider the whole process. Anyone know of a good attorney in the Piedmont Triad area who specializes in regressions?

Announced today:

• The last furniture store in downtown Greensboro is closing after 75 years.
• IKEA is opening a store in Charlotte.
• After a solid month of ridiculously high temperatures, we may see the first frozen precipitation of the season tomorrow.
• As it turns out, my new hometown (or at least its City Council) doesn’t have quite as much sense as I’d been hoping.
• At least, however, I’ll have a better Wal-Mart as of next Monday.

Since many of us on the east coast have forgotten what it looks like, this is snow. It’s not much, but it’s wet, white, and frozen just the same:

Randomly Tuesday:

• For the record, I may have been premature in my earlier endorsement of this insurance broker. Enough said, for the moment. You can be certain, though, that I’ll ultimately say more. At least I am now definitively insured.
• After all my work recording, editing, and burning to DVD epsiodes of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, I read today that a legitimate release of sesaon one is on the way. I think I’ll keep working on season two, though, as I have my doubts about how well this one will sell.
• Alas, it will be ore difficult to record these episodes, since a power surge last week seems to have caused problems with our spiffy new multi-room Dish DVR. I hope it’s not a replay of our earlier problems.
• Coming this week: snow (maybe), a visit from Duncan on Friday, and about three more trips to Greensboro to deal with the current family situation (sigh).

Had a visit from Duncan this weekend, which is always a happy thing. We had dinner at the cafeteria, and breakfast at the Cloverdale, and we even managed to do a quickie tour of Greensboro before coming home and paying tribute to Molly Ivins by watching a show she recorded for the late great BayTV in San Francisco several years ago. I miss Molly.

Speaking of the City of Doom, Mark is back there now. I got to experience the coldest low of the year firsthand as I drove him to the airport at 4:30 this morning.

Now I’m very alone and very cold, but at least the satellite and the video camera are both working again. And I’ve got lots of cheap eggs from the brand new Food Lion.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh?

The big controversy in Charlotte this week is about the appropriateness of saying the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. Of course, you’d think the flag-waving nationalistic types would be ecstatic that people want to recite the stupid pledge at all, but they’re not.

I guess it’s all about empty symbolic gestures, like the insistence that one swear oaths in court (or oaths of office) with a hand on the Christian Bible. Why on earth would anyone want me to swear on a book that means about as much to be as “Aesop’s Fables” or “Tom Sawyer”? Apparently, conservatives reactionaries prefer a memorized, insincere expression of loyalty and truth to an honest and uncoerced one.

My suggestion: all official business in the United States must be conducted using Olde English, since that’s the language God spoke when he and King James first wrote the Bible back in 1611. Thus, it’s God’s “official language” and therefore it should be ours.

This is, after all, an English-speaking, Christian nation, just like it says in the Constitution, right? Oh come on. You know it’s in there somewhere. Maybe toward the back…

Despite what Thomas Wolfe said, I guess you can go home again. Sort of. It’s just that everything looks much different.

I spent tonight in the same building where I spent much of 1982 through 1984, in the student union at UNCG. I was attending an information session for prospective graduate students, since I’m planning to get my MLIS. (And yes, that’s an announcement of sorts.) But there’s no resemblance whatsoever between the Elliott Center of my misspent youth and today’s version.

To start with, the building is about twice as big. It now has a food court and a Barnes & Noble, not to mention an entirely new auditorium. If that weren’t enough, though, they’ve also gutted the old part of the building. Nothing I remember is there anymore. No more radio station hallway where we used to play record frisbee with Survivor albums, no more Student Government office, no more lower level men’s room where I used to, ummm, never mind…

It’s disorienting as hell to be in a building where you’ve spent literally thousands of hours and not to be able to find your way around.

Yes, I live in the south. And this proves it. Don’t miss the special musical close:

As I sit here digitizing a Wire Train album from 1984, I keep asking myself the very same question I used to ask over and over again 23 years ago while spending late nights in the control room at WUAG:

Just what the fuck does “I could make a horse’s head of all your friends” mean?

They’re kidding, right? What software did they use to make that composite, anyway? Excel? And what the hell is that thing on top of his head supposed to be?

Apologies if this is way too much information, but I’ve discovered that having naked pictures of oneself over the course of several years can be a very valuable and reassuring reference when one is wondering if a certain swelling is (a) just two lumps of fat that have always been there or (b) something more sinister.

Yes, it’s just fat. And yes, it’s pretty much always been there, although it’s expanded a bit with my waistline over the past fifteen years. And yes, it’s little paranoid moments like these that are teaching me to love my fat. I will not, however, use that as an excuse to order extra gravy when my parents come over to take me out to dinner tonight.

Or maybe I will…

Here in the south, the prevailing sentiment on undocumented immigrants (or at least the stated one) seems to be that “I don’t mind ‘the Mexicans’ being here. What I mind is the fact that they’re here illegally.” The implication, of course, is that the only justification for discriminating against “the Mexicans” is the fact that they’re breaking the law by being here.

As generally unpleasant and hard to swallow as that logic may be, it seems particularly hypocritical when it’s uttered by someone who professes to have fought for equal rights for homosexuals. Until a few years ago, homosexual activity was illegal in almost every state in the union. The mere fact that same-sex contact was illegal was used by landlords, employers, government agencies, and other institutions as justification for whatever discrimination they deemed appropriate.

You’d think anyone who had been a member of a group that had been irrationally targeted using “illegal behavior” as a justification — homosexuals, members of interracial couples, etc. — would know better, or that he might at least be able to see some parallels here. But you’d be surprised by how often you’d be wrong about that.

Am I suggesting that everyone who breaks any law should be exempt from any consequences? No. I am, however, suggesting that our immigration laws probably need significant fine-tuning, just as our sodomy laws did several years ago. I’m also suggesting that anyone who has been discriminated against merely for breaking an unjust law might want to consider very carefully how he treats others who are in a similar predicament.

This presumes, of course, that “breaking the law” really is the only issue. And you know as well as I do that, sadly, it very often is not.

Three years ago today, he and I were a part of the most romantic act of civil disobedience ever:

You know what? I love him even more now than I did then. Contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t just clutching onto him to stay warm that morning after spending the whole night outside in the cold rain.

I haven’t done one of these in a while. It’s mid-February through the years:

• 2006: The Triangle and some other stuff.
• 2005: The date was set.
• 2004: Wedding bells.
• 2003: Los Angeles.
• 2002: Valentine’s weekend in Fresno.
• 2001: Visit from Duncan.
• 2000: Being recognized in bars and not having sex.
• 1999: Will I be moving?
• 1998: Loving El Nino.
• 1997: New used car (which I’m still driving).

There were a lot of things going on in February in the earlier years too, but for some reason I don’t feel like including them.

I don’t understand. I looked at my stats tonight and I have all these referrals from Live Journal sites belonging to people I don’t know. When I go to check out the sites in question, I don’t see any links to me. They all seem legitimate, so I don’t think it’s referrer spam. I just don’t get it.

Unrelated: has anyone used Super Duper, the semi-shareware backup utility? Any opinions?

When we entered into the relationship, I knew I wasn’t the first. And there have been some tense moments over the years, mostly when we were in San Francisco or (as is so often the case) when we travelled together. A lot of effort has to go into a healthy relationship, and I’ve neglected things from time to time. Both of us have our faults and our weaknesses, and we’ve both been through a lot.

But I wouldn’t trade these past ten years for anything.

Y’know, nothing quite hits the spot right before bedtime like a nice cold glass of Barium Sulfate. Yummy.

Did you ever notice how whenever you announce you’re getting a cold, someone always tells you that “there’s one going around”, as if this were some significant bit of wisdom to which only they — and now you — were privy?

Of course there’s a cold “going around”. There’s always a cold “going around.” That’s what colds do. It’s not like I whippped up a nice big batch of virus all by myself for my own use while I was cooking my eggs this morning.

OK. I feel better now. But my throat still hurts.

Ah, what a wonderful time and place we live in:

Actually, it’s pretty nasty stuff, but I’m tremedously excited that it even exists.