So there I was on break, enjoying a Diet Coke on the front steps of the library, when I felt the need to stretch. This being neither surprising nor controversial, I complied unthinkingly with my body’s request.

Alas, it was at this point that my pants’ waistband decided to act on its mad longing for my shoes. Up and back went my arms, as I tried to stretch a bit of life back into my office-bound torso, and down and down and down went my pants.

Nothing snaps one out of a good stretch quite like public mortification. The pants weren’t down long, but down they were. I was too humiliated even to look and see who might have seen me; there was noone in my immediate line of sight, but that’s not at al reassuring as the great stone steps would have blocked out any views from that direction anyway.

As you may be unfortunate enough to know, times gets terribly sloggy at moments like those. I have no idea, then, exactly how much had passed between the time I recovered my pants and turned to see a large group of incoming freshman w/ parents being given the ol’ campus tour.

I guess I can take heart that I may’ve made their introduction to the library memorable but still.

I like potato chips. I like potato chips lots, in fact, and I like lots of potato chips.

The thing about potato chips, though, is that there’s a definite, but a priori unknowable, range containing the number of potato chips one can eat and be pleased. Let us call this range a to b, where a is the minimum number of chips one can eat and be maximally satisfied and b the greatest number of chips one can eat and be maximally satisfied.

If one is like me, one almost never eats fewer than a chips unless there are fewer than a chips in the bag to begin with. This is generally only experienced with bags purchased from a vending machine. It is easy, though, to eat more than b chips; it may even be inevitable.

Eating more than b chips may take one past the point of maximum satiety, but doing so is not necessarily disastrous. Let us then posit a number of chips n, which is the minimum number of chips one can eat and still experience the dreadful sensation of having eaten well-too-many chips.

The limit n the point at which the chewed chips seem to solidify into a salty globule in your stomach and you wish you’d never taken up the chip-eating habit to begin with. Chip-eating, as I’m sure you are well aware, possesses the especially unfortunate attribute such that chip n-1 is not recognizable until after one has made the mistake of eating chip n.

Occassionally, one will find oneself in the awkward position of eating chip n and then realizing there is a small number of chips left in the bag. Bad-brainage will kick in as the resistance toward wasting food will override one’s knowledge that one has already passed the point at which further chips will not only not be enjoyable but will retroactively decrease the value of chips eaten with values less than n. One may eat as many as n+7 chips, cursing the last handfull and then generally swearing off chips for a couple of months. It is not at all pleasant, but it happens.

Batman Begins is about n+12 potato chips.

Some friends have invited me to tag along to a new film called Batman Begins. It seems to be enjoying a rather impressive groundswell of popularity, but I haven’t read up on it. I prefer to go into this things ready to be surprised, don’t you know.

What I’ve gathered so far is that Michael Caine plays an older gentlemen who helps Christian Bale along the way to becoming a superstar cricket player. I know Cillian Murphy is in it, perhaps portraying the bowler from the side rivalling Bale’s.

Now, I’m not much up on the intricacies of cricket, but I do try to support independent cinema. Will report back on returning.

From Generation Chickenhawk, by Max Blumenthal:

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. “The people opposed to the war aren’t putting their asses on the line,” Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn’t he putting his ass on the line? “I’m not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country,” he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, “and I wasn’t going to pass that up.”

Remember how in the 1990s the GOP were “the party of personal responsibility”? I wonder what happened.

(via Digby)

At some point fairly early on, I think as the appetizer dishes were being removed, our gay waiter leaned in and made a mildly clever double entendre sort of thing. It was nothing raunchy, of course, and not so much sexual as sociable, if you know what I mean. He then said, still clearing dishes, “You know, it’s not every table I can say something like that to.” And off he walked.

Straight Boy’s eyes bugged, as they do in situations like this. And this wasn’t the first such sitch: A few weeks back, for example, we were having coffee and cake at Bad Ass. Once we got settled into our seats on the patio, I realized I had not been given a fork. I went back in to ask for when, and the barista said, “Sure. Does your boyrfriend need one too?” I repeated the convo on returning outside, and his eyes they did bug.

But back to tonight: Once our waiter was out of earshot, Straight Boy began gesticulating wildly and, in an acceptably inside-voice way, wailing things along the lines of, “See? See? Why does this always happen to me? Do I need to start scratching myself and spitting?” It wasn’t a fit of anger or disgust, to be sure, more the uncorking of a lot of frustration.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell Straight Boy why that sort of thing always happened to him, but I did share with him the fact that I had thought him Very Much Other Than Straight Boy when first I met him. I also told him that most people ’round here have acted bloody shocked when I told them I was gay, causing me to consider the possibility of printing up T-shirts. I realized too late that he probably would take the exact opposite of comfort from that statement.

It was all in all a pleasant meal, and P.F. Chang’s is surprisingly good for the kind of place that it is.

Things were different then. They must have been different then, for today I can hardly see any Bible Belt city willfully and enthusiastically wrapping itself in the mantle of paganism. In the late 1800s, though, Fundamentalism hadn’t even been invented while Classical and historicist references were still all the rage. Thus it came to pass that the Tuscaloosa city fathers, having planted an abundance of oak trees among the major thoroughfares and such, first adopted the nickname “Oak City” for the town and then allowed and encouraged the nickname’s transmogrification into “Druid City”.

The name persists in some of the city’s established institutions and some of the older signage, now sadly succumbing to weather and age, but you don’t really hear much about it these days. It was, therefore, a great shock and tremendous pleasure when Michael M. introduced me recently to a monument memorializing that peculiar, vaguely sinister bit of local tradition.

Diagonally across the intersection from the southeast corner of the campus Quad, in the heart of the church district (in fact, abutting a Methodist church and within spitting distance of the campus Baptist Union), stands a sculpture installation that, frankly, couldn’t be more out of synch with the town’s (and state’s, and region’s) mores. Not only does this installation commemorate Tuscaloosa’s once-proudly claimed Druid affinities, it actually seems to glorify human sacrifice.

I love it beyond what words can express.

Because of the unusual arrangement of the figures, I was unable to get a good shot giving a sense of the entire piece. Here’s the best I could do:

You’ll notice the installation is comprised of four separate pieces, three standing figures and one figure laid out on a central altar. You may also notice that two of the upright figures are facing the same direction (which happens to be toward the road that runs in front of the small but verdant grove in which the installation is placed) while the third upright figure faces in the opposite direction. You won’t notice it from the photo, but the two figures facing the same direction are placed such that they are not parallel; this is reminiscent of the placement of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and creates an eerie effect in the viewer when he or she realizes that the gazes of these two sinister figures intersect at some unknown (but knowable!) point in the distance. (They are facing toward the west, and therefore the sunset, which is likely to be somehow significant. Perhaps at certain times of year the two figures are staring directly into the setting sun?)

The third standing figure, facing away and east, is also a bit askew, standing not at the midpoint of the line connecting the two west-facing figures but noticeably farther south. Further, his gaze is not perpendicular to the line connecting the other two figures but is also placed a bit “off”. The placement of the figures strongly suggests intentionality, which when taken together with the subject matter is a bit off-putting indeed.

Each standing figure possesses a distinct head, but otherwise they look basically like this:

A look at the figures’ rears yields a bit of disturbance, as one realized the artist intentionally left gaping holes where the heads were inserted. The effect is one of emphasizing both the artificiality of the piece and the supernatural interconnectedness suggested by the scene as a whole. It’s damned ooky, is what it is:

The most disturbing thing the viewer sees at first is the sacrificial altar around which the three figures are arranged. Note the oak leaves worked into the side:

A view from above provokes the viewer, explicitly representing bloody sacrificing while arranging elements that are similar but not quite identical to the standing figures’ cloaks to suggest that the bloody offering could have been either human or angel:

A detail at the top of the altar seems to me very clever indeed, repeating the head-space detail from the standing figures without actually providing a head, strongly suggesting decapitation and, by extension, other unpleasantries:

Pretty creepy, eh? Well, you haven’t seen the most bizarre bit yet. It’s not immediately apparent, hidden as it is by stone cloaks and leafy shadows, but the three stand figures not only have different faces but actually prove to be different species.

The figure facing away, toward the east, on his own is clearly human:

The two figures facing west, though, are…brr. The northernmost figure, on close inspection, turns out to be a terrible monster appearing to represent the terrible incarnation of Nature itself:

(That’s the best photo I could get, as the monster’s face has been deliberately obscured by the artist.)

The third, southernmost, figure creeped me out most of all. It doesn’t show up quite as well here as it does in person, but the third figure is a terrible chimera, half human and half Nature-demon:

Why and when this installation was erected I have no idea. Judging from the style, especially from the incorporation of natural elements and the way the materials were used, I would guess it was created somewhere between the early 1970s and the mid-80s; I could, of course, be way off. I’m not sure who owns the small park in which it is ensconced or how the artist got permission to erect such a horrifying (it really is majorly shiversome once you start picking up the little details in person) statue in such a cheery (and Christianity-drenched) location, but I’m certainly glad she or he managed it.

Ronald Reagan has been voted Greatest American by the general public. I weep.

I wonder what put him over the top. Was it his discovery that ketchup was, indeed, a vegetable? His reliance on astrological forecasts while in office? His “plausible deniability” re: Iran-Contra? Oh, I know, I bet it was his shameless fellating of the Religious Right.

Hey, techy folks, a question: I wanted to check out (…) a few minutes ago but on opening the page I found nothing but the template bits and a message saying “no posts match your criteria”. I went into the blog management area and saw the Recent Activity area held a list of my most recent entries, but on trying to recover the list of entries from the Manage Posts screen I again got “no posts match your criteria.”

I, quite naturally, freaked. I logged into my website admin page, opened up the blog’s database, and saw that all my posts still resided exactly where they should be. I then started poking around the WordPress FAQs and, after much searching, found a page suggesting I clear my cache and cookies to remedy the problem. I did so, reloaded the page, and *bam!* everything was back to normal.

But why should this be so? What cookie or cached page could have fouled up my request to view posts? I don’t get it and would love an explanation.

Tell me, good persons far and wide, is it just a frankly bizarre local happenstance or a widespread phenomenon for straight men in their early-to-mid-twenties to act, sound, and look totally gay?

Now, to be clear here, I am not talking about “metrosexuality”. I don’t mean young straight men developing dinner-plate pecs and chiselled abs. I’m not talking about guys taking care of their skin and wearing well-fitting, attractive clothing. This isn’t a grooming-products thing, and it’s not an eating-decent-food thing. It’s more an appropriation, or at least an apparent appropriation, of markers both subtle and overt that have, at least as long as I’ve been around, been signifiers of gaymosexuality.

The most obvious such signifier is the Truman Capote lilt. You know, the softly nasal vowels and…well, the troglodytes tend to call it a lisp, but really it’s not a lisp at all. It does share some similiarities, I think, to stereotypical male surfer-speak (at least the mass-media version; I’ve no personal acquaintance with the real thing) but tends to have noticably shorter vowels. You all know what I’m talking about, right? Think Paul Lynde, think Charles Nelson Reilly, think Mr. Humphries from Are You Being Served?.

This style of vocalization seems to be running rampant among left-leaning young (apparently) het males around here, and I’m wondering how wide-spread this phenomenon is.

Also increasingly common, but less observable outside one-on-one interaction, is (avowedly) heterosexual men using steretypically gay somatic displays. (That’s an awkward way to put it, but “mannerisms” is a bit too strong and on-the-nose, I think.) This is harder to explain if you’ve never really picked it out as a gay trait, which I think is a strong possibility for you lovely straight folk out there; this is one of those things that I think has traditionally served as an in-group/out-group marker and may be the basis for the mythical trait of “gaydar”.

I’m not sure how to describe this, as any attempt to wrap the attributes in words make them sound more apparent and strongly-exhibited than they actually, in my experience, are. Part of it is an increased facial animation, but nothing close to the Jim-Carrey-rubberface. There’s an increased tendency toward prolonged eye contact, there’s generally more active hand movement (called “hypermimia”, I learned in a long-ago game of Scattergories) than is found in Anglo-centric cultures, and there’s also a tendency toward stances and postures that are welcoming (sometimes inviting) of others into one’s personal space.

There are probably other things, many other things, but I can’t quite work out exactly what they are. I guess the best way to put the question would be, “Are you more often than previously surprised when a new young male acquaintance you’d pegged as gay turns out to (claim to be) straight?”

Or maybe it’s all just me, I dunno. It’s not something I’ve noticed recently, I remember getting this impression back in Huntsville on many occassions, but it does seem to crop up more frequently here than any place I’ve lived before.

Or maybe the Annex, whence these many reels came, is infected with alien dust mites attempting to colonize the Earth through mood control of humans. Or something else I haven’t thought of. Whatever it is, all this microfilm is this close to driving me stark, raving bonkers.

In other news, I’ve learned one cannot innocently ask a person of the sex to which one is attracted whether they’ve ever had a massage. That is to say, the query will not be received as innocent regardless of the speaker’s motive and intent.