Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Cartoon of the day: D-Day 2004 by Mike Lester at Backspin
Missing sibling of the day: if you see Veronica, tell her to answer her email. Or her phone.

At sunrise on Tuesday morning here on the East Coast you can see the first transit of Venus in 122 years. See Space Weather for details by country, live video links, and the like. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by telling you not to stare at the sun or put your retinas at the receiving end of any magnifying equipment pointed at said sun. Sky and Telescope has some information on solar filters - the most interesting one being the Pop-Tart wrapper.

The weather in Boston will be partly cloudy, so we may have to wait until 2012 to see Venus in action.

Mac security hole site of the day: another fine hole recap from Daring Fireball

The power was out for five hours today, but you know, it could have been worse. (Thanks to MacNetJournal for the link.) The next date of disempowering has not been scheduled - blog services could fail at any time. In the last third-world country I called home, the power would go out whenever the wind blew. There’s a thunderstorm passing through at this very mo–

So many links have piled up on my Third World Watch here in Boston that I’m not sure how I’ll get through them all.

The road to May perdition all started when the Boston Globe published explicit pornography as news. World Net Daily found the Internet pron source of the alleged photos of GI’s raping Arab prisoners. The Globe had to apologize, though no heads rolled and they didn’t admit the real source of the images. Ironically, the Boston Herald rejected the photos as unsubstantiated and highly suspicious. (For those of you playing the home game, that’s like the New York Times falling for a scam that the New York Post sees right through.)

After all that the onset of gay marriage, complete with an ongoing flap between the governor and certain cities over marrying non-Massachusetts residents, was a drop in the bucket.

Then there was the title scandal, in which a couple of letter carriers stopped delivering mail to a JP housing project for fear of their lives. Service has been restored - much more quickly, the article mentions, than in Fall River where part of the city was cut off for weeks for similar reasons.

Now I hear that I may get carded for taking the T. My civil liberty to travel more slowly by streetcar than on foot without ID is about to be infringed. I can hear the conversation now:

“What do you mean, you’re going to South Station? You’re on a bus bound for Cambridge.”

“Really, officer, it’s the fastest way. The Green Line is no way to get downtown. If I catch the Red Line in Harvard Square–”

“I’m going to need to see some ID, ma’am.”

“Will my Shaw’s card do?” I wave the little keychain tag at the officer’s high-tech terrorist detection system.

“No. Can I see your license?”

“I tried to renew it, but the line at the DMV was three days long and then they asked for my social security card which I lost back in ‘93…”

“Mass liquor ID?”

“The line at the DMV was three days long–”

“Passport?”

“Do I need one to visit Cambridge?”

The officer sighs and moves on, before I get the chance to offer him my CVS Extra Value card.

And last but not least, the reason why I had to Boston-blog today: the power goes out tomorrow for three weeks. Initial warnings of this upcoming event came by automatic dialer and were phrased in terms of two half-hour outtages one weekend morning - I had to listen to the voicemail several times through before I figured out they meant the electricity (rather than phone, gas, water, or sewage). Since then, much scarier warnings have been posted all over the building. I admit, they don’t explicitly predict 3 weeks without electricity, but they’re phrased in such a way that if the power does go out for the entire 3 weeks, they can say we were warned.

It’s not the hardship it sounds, because we’re not allowed to have air conditioners anyway. If thing go awry, as they so oft do here in the third world, I may have to eat half a gallon of ice cream in one sitting - a hardship for which I’m well-prepared.

Fortunately, with WordPress I can blog ahead of time and it will publish my entries on its own. You may not even notice the interruption of blogging services.

After all that, I forgot to mention the upside of discovering new places in Boston - sometimes they’re candy stores. I’ve seen the Arcade at Coolidge Corner before (318 Harvard Street, near the Coolidge Corner Theater), but never ventured far inside its mini-mall walls.

But since I was on a walk of exploration yesterday I gave it a go. All the way in the back I found it, the Holy Grail of sweet teeth everywhere - a candy store with bins. Sure, you can get candy at any of the zillion drug stores in Coolidge Corner, but they don’t have bins. Sweet Satisfaction is owned by a Brookline woman, so you know your candy money is going back into the community instead of down to RI (the headquarters of CVS).

Zoning law of the day: the RLUIPA (Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act)

I’ve lived here for years but I can still get lost within half a mile of my apartment. Today I wandered down a different street just to vary the scenery of my walk to the post office and discovered an entire neighborhood I’d never known was there, filled with lovely Victorian houses on quiet tree-lined streets.

Before I found the neighborhood in between I would have said that the main road I started out on and the parallel road I was making for were separated by maybe one other road, or maybe the apartment buildings even backed directly on each other. If I’d kept walking long enough on the first road that would have become true. The trouble with Boston, though, is that none of the roads are straight.

It sounds simple enough on the face of it - some cities are planned on a grid, and others are arranged around cowpaths from colonial times. On a grid, you can always tell where you are, and that there are ten streets of predictable behavior between 70th and 80th. With squiggly cowpaths that change names every 500 yards and counties every mile, there’s no telling what you’ll find, especially if, like me, you keep thinking of the main roads as straight.

So the topology of Boston in my mind is highly non-Euclidean - in fact, it makes relativistic space-time look tame by comparison. My virtual Boston is laid out in virtual spokes of the virtual hub, made up of the branches of the Green Line and the other subway lines, with some bus routes crossing them. Places closer to the T have more fundamental solidity, while places off the T lines exist in a nebulous underworld of faerie Victorians. The trolley tracks mark the rays of maximum coherence, where the cardinal Bostonian directions of Inbound and Outbound can be readily identified. The midpoints between T lines form ghostly spokes of maximum confusion, where wise children should leave breadcrumb trails when wandering out of sight of a known bus route.

Needless to say, none of the spokes, light rail or ghostly, are actually straight, so the amount of real, solid land between them varies enormously. Thus entire neighborhoods can be hidden away, and people can get lost just hundreds of yards away from the T.

For example, at a point in my walk where I did know where I was, a guy in a minivan asked me where the Whole Foods (Bread and Circus to us old timers) was. He said he’d been driving around looking for it for an hour. Whole Foods is on a major road that doesn’t change names and goes in both directions; its street address corresponds to the one name of that road; it has several big green signs in front that say Whole Foods; and, in a city with no parking to speak of, it boasts an alluring parking lot that spans the entire block.

He was literally 300 yards away from Whole Foods, on that very road, when he asked me for directions. That’s what “none of the roads are straight” means.

The Stoneham Theater is presenting Lizze Borden: The Musical throughout the month of May. It’s a shame it’s in Stoneham rather than here or in the original 1892 venue, Fall River.

Governor Romney’s legal counsel has advised justices of the peace to quit now or forever hold their peace. We also have a handy 1913 law that will prohibit non-residents from marrying in Massachusetts if their home states forbid homosexual marriage. The Article 8 Alliance is working on removing the offending judges from the Supreme Judicial Court before May 17th.

I’m a Romney fan and also an Orson Scott Card fan, but I never expected to bring the two of them together in one blog entry. I accidentally stumbled over an article by OSC about Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization. He makes all the standard con points, but being a great writer he does it better than I’ve seen elsewhere. Take, for example, the timeless lines:

Supporters of homosexual “marriage” dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court [sic] has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.
You can’t add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.

I wonder if OSC knows that adding runways to Logan Airport was, until homosexual marriage, the hottest topic at the SJC, or if the irony is entirely accidental.

Like OSC, I’m of the let-the-dead-marry-their-dead persuasion:

The proponents of this anti-family revolution are counting on most Americans to do what they have done through every stage of the monstrous social revolution that we are still suffering through — nothing at all.
But that “nothing” is deceptive. In fact, the pro-family forces are already taking their most decisive action. It looks like “nothing” to the anti-family, politically correct elite, because it isn’t using their ranting methodology.
The pro-family response consists of quietly withdrawing allegiance from the society that is attacking the family.

So when I blog about gay marriage, as I have a few times already, my interest is not a literal interest in what happens to the culture - I’ve withdrawn my mental funds from that bank - but the detached sociological interest of an aspiring sci-fi writer and all-around INTP. For me, the most notable point OSC made was when he touched briefly on the myth that homosexuals are “born that way” - he gives more credit to direct environmental influences such as seduction and abuse.

So far it looks like the classic nature/nurture debate, but there’s a third possible explanation: homosexuality could be, quite literally, a disease - an infectious disease caused by a pathogen. That’s part of the thesis put forth in Infectious causation of disease: an evolutionary perspective. It’s a big PDF with only a few paragraphs on homosexuality, so let me summarize:

Homosexuality does not follow the usual pattern of genetic expression (for example, high correlation between identical twins), nor can such a counter-reproductive strategy sustain itself in the gene pool. Whether or not you consider genetic abnormalities a disease, homosexuality isn’t directly genetic. (See the article for more about what can and cannot be attributed to genetic causes.) Like many people, the scientists speculate that normal heterosexual drives are too strong for purely cultural influences to overcome - that is, the gay man is to be believed when he says that he is just that way. (And homosexual sheep have no gay culture to account for their tendencies.) So if he’s just that way, but wasn’t born that way, how did he get that way?

Enter the pathogen. The authors speculate that homosexuality, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, various cancers, and other diseases have unknown infectious causes. Like ulcers, these diseases show a certain statistical incidence which will eventually be traced back to pathogens, and cured. Like MS, homosexuality may be the result of an untraceable childhood infection.

Thus say the scientists. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter all that much whether homosexuality is genetic, infectious, environmental, or all of the above, because in principle (which is short for in the future) such factors can be corrected. Given the opportunity to cure the common gay, heterosexual parents will choose to do so.

The only refuge of homosexuality from science is the option no one is buying, not even OSC - that is, that being gay is purely a personal lifestyle choice. Anything that isn’t a choice is susceptible to a future cure. Strangely enough, lesbians are less likely to attribute their orientation to genetic or environmental influences. They may not even have the nameless disease, if there is a disease.

I am sad to report that two of my housepets have perished in the hazardous snaptraps I use to feed them. A word to wise fieldmice with the ambition to become housemice: if the beef jerky in the cupboard that usually holds glasses and bakeware seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

The exterminator came and noticed that one of the walls (though not the one in which my new pet currently resides) is open to the cabinet under the sink. You can see the unplastered slats and everything. It looks like when the new sink was put in (judging from the logo, in the fifties, but from the shoddy installation, probably later), the baseboard was cut out to fit the cabinet against the wall and that gap behind it was never filled in. The cabinet covers part of it, but has no back wall of its own to cover the whole gap.

So, going with the antiques theme, the exterminator left some V for Victory traps under the sink and is coming back next week to fix the hole in the wall. I didn’t know exterminators did their own plastering, but I guess you can’t trust the contractors to get it right.

I wonder if I’ll hear a little squeal in the night…

Sorry I couldn’t find the time to blog yesterday, what with that hour so rudely yanked from my evening. (Now there’s an excuse you don’t hear every day!) A recent shipment of educational videos from Jerie didn’t help, either.

My excuse for this sorry entry is a trip with a gaggle of minor cousins to the exhibit of Caroline Kennedy’s dolls at the JFK Library and Museum. Don’t let the low-key website fool you - the JFK Library is a major Boston institution, devoted to Brookline’s favorite son. You know that a spot of ground is holy in Boston when it has a T stop named after it, and the JFK comes first in JFK/UMass.

It’s very rarely that I say this, but the JFK Library is a lovely piece of modern architecture. I could almost forgive I. M. Pei for Government Center after seeing it. That black bit is all glass, with a spectacular view of Massachusetts Bay. It’s also neat, clean and modern inside, setting it apart from other Boston T-stop institutions such as the Museum of Science (Science Park stop on the Green Line), where many of the exhibits are broken and/or haven’t been updated in forty years (really - the museum itself is 174 years old) - or on the other hand, the only slightly less shabby yet far more insolvent New England Aquarium (Aquarium stop on the Blue Line), which is no longer accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.

I don’t mean to complain about the third-world conditions again, just to point out that the People of the Monarchy of Massachusetts support the royal family first and foremost, in their hearts and in their wallets. As we strolled the hallowed halls, saw the sacred artifacts, heard the timeless speeches, and read the undying words of the nation’s most beloved president, even a lower-case r republican like myself couldn’t help feeling that the king is dead, long live the king.

It’s a Massachusetts thing.