The online journal, notebook and playground of HFM

A Kite That Couldn’t Be Tied Down

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  • Post category:Brain Food

This is beautiful:

I swooned at the thought of her reading something undoubtedly wonderful in the adjoining compartment but forced myself to nod. We looked out the window: a herd of camels, for a flash of a second. We were in the Gobi Desert.

Nights were hard. She was inevitably inches away, sleeping peacefully as my desire for her boiled. In Ulan Bator, under a sky thick and white with stars, we decided to sleep in a yurt on the steppe. As her brother slept, she whispered to me: “Have you heard about that hand-built, nine-grotto Virgin Mary shrine some priest spent 42 years piecing together in Iowa?”

I told her I’d build her a bigger one if she wanted.

She laughed and played with my hair, knowing it was true but not wanting to show it. The shrine I had already built for her was painfully exposed; in two years my mainstream existence had been razed to the ground to make room for a garden in which her every eccentricity was welcomed to bloom. What was I doing in Mongolia? It seemed I would follow her anywhere.

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U.S. District Court Decision: Perry v. Schwarzenegger

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  • Post category:GLBT Issues

The whole document it’s entirety, courtesy of the New York Times. There is some scrumptious reading here; things that just make me giddy with glee.

“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.”

also:

“Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate.”

and these:

“Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.”
“Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital unions.”

“The sexual orientation of an individual does not determine whether that individual can be a good parent.”

“Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.”

“That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as ‘fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.'”

Heaven.

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Dragon Dictation for the iPhone

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  • Post category:Writing

I’ve been playing with the Dragon Dictation for the iPhone to transcribe some blog ideas that occur to me when I drive to work in the morning. I have about a 20 minute drive and I usually have several ideas that I’d like to write about in that time, but in the hectic moments after I arrive for work I tend to forget them. Sometimes I remember them later, but often they go “poof!” off into the ether never to return. Hopefully this will let me remember a few more of those thoughts. Basically you talk into the app, it transcribes it into text, and you can do various things with the text including emailing to yourself. Here is the Dragon Dictation version of this post, which is amusing in and of itself.

I’m trying out dragon dictation again this is that program I love it on my iPhone. It said it would does translation type stuff and playing around with it now on my phone to see if I can write some blog posts on the way to work and a lot of ideas on the way work better at gym over and over to myself in hopes that I will actually remember them when I finally get to work and then I get to work and hectic everything goes crazy and I forget what I wanted to write about Sonja to try to do some of the dictation on the phone while I am on the way to work and then on my book was written and I’ll be able to e-mail the dictation to myself or my phone which is pretty cool because it makes little text file and then you can e-mail it to yourself. I’ll be back and I’ll see if I can then have something readable than that way I won’t forget all of my

Yeah, part of that incoherence is my own tendency to ramble and jump back and forth between ideas, part of it is the strangeness of articulating thoughts out loud that I normally write down instead, and part of it is DD just not recognizing what I was saying. And I have no idea who Sonja is.

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links for 2010-08-05

  • The Dangerous Art of the Right Question
    Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation. When you are faced with a difficult situation, you will start as a prisoner of the unanswerable/too expensive formulaic questions, and your first job is to break out. The reason the weird “right questions” work is that they expose cracks in your default, formulaic mental model. By attacking those cracks, you force the useless default mental model to collapse, creating room for a new one.
    (tags: analysis communication insight problem-solving must-read)
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Prop 8 Overturned by Federal Court

According to MSNBC news services:

SAN FRANCISCO — In a major victory for gay rights advocates, a federal judge on Wednesday struck down a California ban on same-sex marriage.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the voter-approved ban, known as Proposition 8, violates due process and equal-protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.

…

“Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples,” Walker wrote.

The judge added in the conclusion of the 136-page opinion: “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”

His ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by two same-sex couples and the city of San Francisco seeking to invalidate the law as an unlawful infringement on the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. The landmark case is expected to be appealed and could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

This is really great news – baby steps, but definitely steps. One day our marriage might actually be recognized in our own country and home state.

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Barkley McBarkerson

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  • Post category:Journal

Barkley McBarkersom
Spike has turned up the volume on telling the neighbors to stay away from his yard lately. He’s making my “he’s so low maintenance” claims out to be false, the little goofball. I know he’s going to turn eight this month, but he’s too young to turn into a grouchy old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.

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Big City Farms

Big City Farms

Our very yummy half share of produce from Big City Farms

Big City Farms is a Community Supported Agriculture farm on 8 city lots in downtown Indianapolis. We bought into a half-share this year, and get to swing by and pick up a box of veggies every week. Organic, local food with less that 1 travel mile. Delicious!

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Uncluttering projects

I haven’t stalled out on the de-cluttering and organizing projects, I just don’t have photos to put up quite yet – I’m still working on the great furniture shuffle. I purchased a new desk and new china cabinet at Ikea last week, and have put them both together. I unloaded and removed the old shelving unit, which is residing on the porch until I can transport it to it’s final resting place. I just have to install the lights into the china cabinet and we’ll be set to load it up with china and glasses that go there, along with table cloths. And I need to clean out the pantry and find room for tools, which will unearth an avalanche of discard-able items. It’s all proceeding nicely and we’re getting to the place where I start working on smaller items again.

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