Speaker For The Diodes - May 11th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-13:

"The right research and policy question today is not 'what kind of family do we wish people lived in?' Instead, we must ask 'what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more successfully?'" -- Stephanie Coontz, "The Future of Marriage".

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/01/14/stephanie-coontz/the-future-of-marriage/]

(submitted to the mailing list by Kelly Groves)

10:00 am - Checkin In, and Cane Thoughts

Re-re-shuffling my plans & to-do list for the first half of the week. While the dizziness continues to mostly stay away and to be chased away with meclizine when it does approach, there are still the matters of fibromyalgia pain and sleep-wackiness: despite having a no-dizziness/no-migraine day yesterday, by the time I got pain levels in my legs and back down enough to really feel like coping with being upright, it was a bit late in the day to make the trek to Bowie to visit Mom. (I hope one of my siblings did something nice...) So I rearranged my expectations, including planning to do today a couple of things I'd previously intended to do on the way to or from Mom's. Then I utterly failed to sleep last night; if I'm lucky, I'll fall asleep before the morning gets much more stale and be up again early enough to take meds in time for them to be working before this evening -- and whether I make it out this evening or not, what I'd re-planned for this afternoon is gonna be re-rescheduled for tomorrowish (except for a couple of writing and filling-out-forms tasks that I can do at home if I fail to get to College Park tonight, but at the moment I'm assuming they'll be Tuesday tasks).

Not absolutely excruciating pain yesterday -- God knows I've suffered much worse -- but enough to make me feel somewhat less than mobile.

I did manage a brief outing this weekend to spend some of the grocery money a friend sent via PayPal, but I only got as far as a convenience store, so I've got bread and milk but still need to do a proper shopping run for cat litter, yogurt, potatoes, etc. Knowing I've got most of a loaf of bread and a few ounces of cheese downstairs does cut the stress level a little -- enough to notice. As does knowing I'll be able to pick up a few other essentials shortly. I hate asking my friends for that sort of help (okay, I suck at asking for help in general, I know), but I am very grateful for the help I got in response.

I wasn't sure how much I'd wind up using the cane after the dizziness receeded, but my right leg was bothering me enough when I went shopping, that I decided I ought to take it with me just in case, and see how much difference it made. That was the right call, though my right arm got a bit tired. (Using it just for stability, I could switch hands if I wanted to; using it to take the stress off a hurting leg, I wanted to keep it on that side.) I'm not sure how I want to manage the cane on days when the drugs are enough to make the cane superfluous (or when the pain is mostly above the waist): take it with me in case I start hurting more while I'm out, or leave it home (or, more likely, in the car) because it's one more thing to get in my way and take up a hand when I don't need it, and a small additional drain on spoons up until I get to the point where it can start saving me some spoons. The amount I hurt does vary quite a bit.

It did occur to me to rig a strap so I could sling it across my back when not using it. Then I got this mental image of myself with all sorts of Things I Might Need arrayed around my body, looking like the "well-equipped adventurer" figurine one of my college friends got and painted, and I thought that might not actually be the way to wind up ...

The Plan, of course, is to continue to try to time my meds and my sleep such that I'm feeling well enough to get around normally when I need to go out -- so, at least with my current thinking on the subject, y'all will most likely see me on days when I don't need to use it, especially if I also need to carry the double bass or a couple of guitars -- but the cane does nudge the hurting-too-badly-to-go-anywhere threshold in a useful direction, at least when I'm not carrying much. And it comes in handy when the VCR spits out a tape at the wrong moment and I want to push it back in. Anyhow, where before you could use my footwear as a clue to how well I'm doing (in flats but not in boygarb == hurting quite a lot but not quite badly enough to keep me from leaving the house at all), now there'll be an additional visible clue in the absence or presence of a cane. I'm not sure yet exactly what the order will be (I haven't experimented enough to know whether I should switch from heels to flats before or after picking up the cane (and I'm not going to assume without experimenting)).

And I'm now starting to sound a little less coherent to myself and feel inclined to ramble and add lots of extra parenthetical bits, which means sleep is probably finally catching me. And that's a Good Thing, since I've been waiting to be able to fall asleep for about the last nine hours. Here's hoping. Gonna post this and close my eyes instead of making another editing pass, lest I miss this sleep-window. Hope this makes sense as-is & I didn't leave off half a sentence somewhere.

03:31 pm - Ironic Fuzzies

Didn't fall sleep after all, which puts my evening plans in jeopardy yet again. Finishing up some mostly-written entries I had sitting around while I wait for the next spell of 'maybe I can fall asleep now' ...

Sometime after I started crossposting and realized that I couldn't use <lj user="XXXX"> to refer to people because that would generate a link to that username local to each site (which may or may not exist, and may or may not be the same human for each site on which the username exists), I posted a suggestion in the LJ suggestion area requesting that the syntax of that tag be expanded to be able to refer to 'foreign' users (e.g. to point to an IJ user in an LJ entry, or vice versa). AFAIK, LJ never did anything with it (please correct me if you know I'm mistaken). When composing an entry in my text editor^[1], I've been pasting in a chunk of HTML for a fictitious user named 'USER' on each site, and doing a global search-and-replace to substitute the name I want to use. (This is a bit more annoying when posting a comment via the web, since (AFAIK) the text-box thingie in my broswers has no search-and-replace feature, but fortunately it doesn't come up as often there because in comments I'm referring to folks on the same site I'm leaving the comment on, more often or not, but when posting an entry and referring to a *J user, they'll be a 'foreign' user on all but one of the sites the entry is crossposted to.)

Dreamwidth, wanting to facilitate cross-site functionality as much as is feasible, went ahead and implemented that feature right away, of course. That pleased me, because it seems like Right Thing designwise, but the irony is that I'm still not using it. Why? Because until all the other sites I crosspost to either (a) switch to using the DW software or (b) add that feature as a patch to the LJ software (unlikely unless LJ decides to add it, and even then some sites never upgrade to a newer release of the LJ code or take a long time to do so), I'm still posting each entries to a bunch of sites that lack the feature and only one that has it.

[ETA: denise reminded me that if I were using the crossposting feature built-in to DW, it would automatically expand the DW version of the foreign user tag to the same chunk of code I'm pasting in by hand as described above.]

I'm still glad they did it, and it'll come in handy ifwhen I need to refer to a non-DW user within a DW comment (likely to happen sooner or later). I'm just a weensy bit frustrated that even though someone implemented what I asked for (whether they got the idea from my suggestion or elsewhere^[2]), I don't get to really take advantage of it. (If anyone else is using that feature, my pleasure at their life being a wee bit easier because DW did the more-useful thing will exceed my frustration.)

[1] Are there Opera and/or Firefox settings/plugins/whatever that'll stick a version of vi in there whenever I click in a text-entry box? That would be convenient.

[2] I think they did get it from me, as, IIRC, one of the DW folks replied to my suggestion when I posted it on LJ -- but it's entirely possible (likely, even) that the idea occurred to several people independently (that is, I think it's "obvious" anyhow) and I was just the first (again, IIRC) to post it as a suggestion there ... and it doesn't really matter either way, as there's no glory in getting credit for seeing a need+solution that obvious. But in my own head I think of it as "my" feature simply because I spent so long wanting LJ to implement it and now it exists (so it's a minor source of warm fuzzies regarding DW, for me). Outside of my skull, any credit goes to the person who actually got around to coding it, methinks.

03:45 pm - 'But you #@%^ just one goat...'

I have a faint, uncertain recollection that I may have written something along these lines before, but since it came up in conversation recently ... realinterrobang said something about how (literally) in-credible a prediction would have been a dozen years ago, that nowadays we would be having national and international conversations about whether torture is justifiable -- that there'd be any real question, anybody supporting it ... and she mentioned the latest politician to have come out spouting torture-apologia, and my reaction was something like, "In a sane world, for a politician to speak out in favour of torture would be his 'but you fuck just one goat' moment," referring to this old joke:

A tourist visiting Scotland spots a man drinking by himself in a pub, looking depressed. The tourist asks him what the trouble is. "Well, me name's MacGregor, and I'm a stone mason by trade. See that pier in the harbor? I built it meself. Took over a year. But do they call me 'MacGregor the Pier Builder?' Nae. And take a look at the roads in this town. Built most of 'em meself. Took years. But do they call me 'MacGregor the Road Builder?' Nah. But you fuck just one goat..."

Now I was going to write about torture, and what it means that, as a culture, we are having this conversation and People Accustomed To Being Taken Seriously As Leaders (or potential leaders) are among those trying to excuse it, but I got sidetracked. You see, I googled the key phrase to make sure I wasn't screwing up the joke somehow due to not having heard it for several years, and while I waited for my sssllloooooooww computer to load relevant-looking pages, I also clicked on some links on my friendspage/readinglist, and was startled to realize that there was a story showing up in both places:

A gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, a morals-and-no-abortions kinda guy, casually reveals that he's had sex with a mule and considers it not a big deal with respect to his reputation and his political aspirations.

Now I suppose polls will show whether he's right about the political impact of his mule-loving coming-out or not. but the synchronicity was distracting regardless. Anyhow, the moral, ethical, religious, symbolic, and psychiatric significance-or-lack-thereof of the bestiality aside, the bigger questions in my mind are whether we-as-a-culture have a long enough attention span for anything to be a "you fuck just one goat" scandal for a politician (sticky-looking memes like "Keating Five" seem to have lost some of their stick recently), and what do we have to do to get advocating torture on the goatfucking-equivalents list? Not so much for action-movie fans trying to have a philosophical debate after a couple pitchers of beer, or college freshmen trying to figure out where the corners are in philosophy class, but for politicians, those who we trust to make and implement policies on our behalf, representing us.