Brokeback Mountain opens Wednesday, Dec. 28th

Due to the large box-office success in its limited run, the movie Brokeback Mountain will open in Indianapolis on Wednesday, December 28th at the Keystone Arts Cinema, rather than the originally scheduled mid-January release date.
Who wants to go? Stephanie and I are seeing it…

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Motorola RAZR Phone

I got a Motorola RAZR phone last night. Stephanie and I upgraded our phones together on a family plan with Cingular, so we could call each other for free any time. She’s had the same phone for over four years, and she really needed to upgrade, so we did it together to save money.
So anyways, We’ve both got cool new camera phones. I got the RAZR, and she got a Sony Ericsson, something or other.
And I’m figuring out if I can sync up my contact info from my laptop to the phone right now. I’m realizing that I don’t have a lot of people’s phone numbers; only their e-mail addresses. How big a web dork am I? So if you want to be in my cell phone directory e-mail me and let me know. 🙂

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Time on Two Crosses–The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

My friend Marti passed along this quote from Bayard Rustin, who was a friend of Martin Luther King’s, and who worked alongside him during the civil rights movement:

“Indeed, if you want to know whether today people believe in democracy, if you want to know whether they are true democrats, if you want to know whether they are human rights activists, the question to ask is, ‘What about gay people?’ Because that is now the litmus paper by which this democracy is to be judged.”
“There are four burdens, which gays, along with every other despised group, whether it is blacks following slavery and reconstruction, or Jews fearful of Germany, must address.
The first is to recognize that one must overcome fear.
The second is overcoming self-hate.
The third is overcoming self-denial.
The fourth burden is more political. It is to recognize that the job of the gay community is not to deal with extremist who would castrate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us.
The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly mainifest that hate. That’s our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment.”

There are a couple of significant differences in what gay and transgendered people face than other oppressed groups of people. One of them is that our families usually don’t prepare us for the hatred and discrimination that will be directed at us as we grow up, or to help us understand who we are and why we are before we face that hatred. Many time the people who discriminate against us are our own family members, which makes it doubly painful.
The other significant difference in the struggle that gay people face is that much of our history is completely lost to time. We know that gay people have been persecuted, oppressed, tortured and executed for centuries because we have seen the evidence of it in our history books, but only from the view of the persecutors, and very little of it survives from the point of view of gay people.
Other oppressed groups were able to pass history of their people through oral tradition through families and communities, and although that is a fragile method, it’s still significant.

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Movies I Need to See (or see again)

Movies that I’ve never seen, or need to see again because it’s been a long time.

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • “The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
  • “8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
  • A Bout de Souffle
  • A Room With a View
  • A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
  • Aguirre: The Wrath of God
  • Around the World in 80 Days
  • Batman Begins
  • “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
  • Better Off Dead
  • The Blues Brothers
  • Bread and Chocolate
  • Brief Encounter
  • Chinatown (1974)
  • D.E.B.S.
  • Dr. Strangelove
  • Fanny and Alexander
  • Finding Nemo
  • Flight Plan
  • Foreign Correspondent
  • The French Connection
  • From Here to Eternity (1953)
  • Full Metal Jacket
  • The Godfather (all 3 parts)
  • Good Night, and Good Luck
  • Ice Storm
  • Inherit the Wind
  • Inside Man
  • It Happened One Night (1934)
  • Junebug
  • Koyaanisqatsi
  • Lagaan: Once Upon A Time in India
  • Lawrence of Arabia
  • Lion King
  • Lost Horizon
  • Me and You and Everyone We Know
  • Meet Me In St. Louis
  • Monsters, Inc.
  • Mulan
  • On the Waterfront (1954)
  • Pirates of the Caribbean
  • Pretty in Pink
  • Pride & Prejudice
  • Raging Bull
  • Reservoir Dogs
  • Schindler’s List (1993)
  • State Fair (1945)
  • The Deer Hunter
  • The French Connection
  • The Graduate (1967)
  • The Seventh Seal
  • Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
  • Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
  • Walk the Line
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Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book

I heard this report first that a student from UMass Dartmouth had received a visit from the Department of Homeland Security after reserving a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s “Little Red Book” of quotes through inter-library loan.
My initial impulse was to buy a copy of the book to see what would happen. Thankfully, I didn’t, because later I read on Boing Boing that the story was suspicious and that maybe all the elements of it didn’t add up.
If I’d ordered a copy of the book and nobody showed up, then I’d have a copy of the dumb old book lying around taking up room for no reason. Which made me wonder why DHS couldn’t investigate something more fun. Maybe I should start a rumor that there are secret hidden messages in the DVDs for the First Season of Fraggle Rock, or that page 28 of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists has a hidden code that unlocks the secrets of the Pyramids. Or maybe that the Xbox game Destroy All Humans is REALLY about destroying all humans. Then I could buy one of them, enjoy myself, and still prepare to have men in black over for tea. I’m sure DAH is a two-player game. Those guys must practice on first-person shooters, right?
UPDATE: It appears that the story about visits from DHS may not really be a hoax. Huh. Maybe I shouldn’t be making jokes about it, then.
UPDATE: It was a hoax.

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The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: How the Spying Story Will Unfold (and Fade)

Sadly, Peter Daou’s analysis of the current spying scandal, in the context of the numerous other impeachable offenses the president has committed, is entirely correct. Bush commits a crime, the media fumbles the story, the Republicans front for him, the Democrats back down, the public gets confused, and eventually the story fades and the crimes continue. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Interesting, the comments people are making on that story. Basically, people are acknowledging that Daou is right, and predicting the end of America. Very disillusioned.

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Either Or And Why? #4

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From belicove.com:

  1. Sugar or Splenda? Sugar, after hearing Elizabeth’s brother talk about Splenda at Thanksgiving.
  2. Paper Clips or Staples? Staples, unless I have to separate the pages later.
  3. Fish or Birds? Fish.
  4. Window Shades or Window Blinds? Curtains, then blinds, then shades.
  5. Online Bill Pay or Mail Them a Check? Online.
  6. Mountain Bike, Road Bike/Cruiser? I really want to get rid of my bike and get an adult tricycle so I can ride to the grocery store instead of driving. Everyone says I’ll look like a retarded person, but I don’t care.
  7. New Year’s Resolutions or April Fools Pranks? New Year’s Resolutions.
  8. Rocking Chair or Couch? Couch.
  9. Subway or Wendy’s? Subway.
  10. Packing or Unpacking? Unpacking.
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Weird text at the bottom of a spam email

A spam message I received this morning had this text at the bottom. I wonder where it came from? I’m guessing from the stuff I’ve seen in the past that they grab text from a website somewhere and insert it into their spam.

Exactly! roared Sykes. And do you believe Johnny St. Jay would willingly destroy his own property, his own business? Stranger things have happened in the outside criminal world, Sir Henry, said Cyril Sylvester Pritchard knowingly. In my official capacity Ive heard many, many stories. The incidents my nephew described are called diversionary tactics employed to create the illusion that the scoundrels are victims. It was all thoroughly explained to me. Oh, it was, was it? cried the former brigadier of the British army. Well, let me explain something else, shall I? Youve been duped by an international terrorist wanted the world over! Do you know the universal penalty for aiding and abetting such a killer? Ill make it plain, in case its escaped your attention-in your official capacity, of course.

Mystery solved, thanks to Google. It appears to be a snippet of text from the Robert Ludlum book The Bourne Ultimatum.

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