Just how chicken IS CFA?

Instead of a kiss-in at CFA locations today, wouldn't it be more useful to have lots of people with clipboards each representing a local charity or organization that helps people soliciting donations and volunteers?

The pro-CFA people largely claim their support is for Christian values. Great! There are lots of organizations that try to feed, clothe, and shelter the poor, work with the elderly and foster kids, advocate for better health care, and so on. This would be a GREAT opportunity for those groups pursuing truly Christian values to network with all the people who make claims to be Christians but for whatever reason seem to have been completely oblivious to the existence of these organizations. Everyone benefits!

It would be educational to see the response to such overt solicitation. While I imagine there might be some uncomfortable exchanges as people try to justify why they have time, energy, enthusiasm, and money to support Mr. Cathy's actions supporting oppression, intolerance, and even murder, but do NOT have the time, energy, enthusiasm, or money to actually do good in their own communities through acts that Jesus Himself promoted in the Gospels. I would also be interested to see the reaction of CFA corporate to these solicitations. Would they support them as an extension of their purported corporate agenda? Would they use this as an opportunity to reallocate some of the $$$ they're currently using against people in the communities they serve to other programs that would be more universally beneficial? Or would they call the cops to get them removed from the premises?

How can we get this kind of activism off the ground?

Deboning the "Chicken"

OK - let's consolidate several discussions/arguments/debates over the whole "Chick-Fil-A" controversy.  

First, I am GLAD that Dan Cathy has a freedom of speech, and am equally glad that he chooses to express his religious beliefs regarding same-sex marriage.   Why?   Because it's important to me that these rights exist and are maintained regardless of the content;  it's a fundamental necessity to a viable society.

This of course requires that I ALSO have the freedom to speak, the freedom to choose my OWN religious beliefs and the freedom to associate the two, as Mr. Cathy has done.  

Where the line has been drawn (and crossed) goes back to the core values upon which this country was formed - namely that everyone is equal and has the same rights, and that laws must be applied equally to all citizens.   We've not been perfect at applying this as all of the struggles over civil rights, etc., have shown, but the actual VALUES have been there since the outset.   At the same time, we have always been a diverse community, hence "E Pluribus Unum" - and it is the combination of our diverseness in culture, belief, and lifestyle that has been one of our mightiest strengths, again supported by our common belief that all are equal.

Mr. Cathy - despite his free speech and protected beliefs also has available to him a company through which he donates money to causes of HIS choosing.   Several of them seek to "qualify equality" for segments of the population, namely non-heterosexuals on the basis of HIS beliefs.   That crosses the line and MUST be countered if we intend to commit to the core value of equality.    The severeness of this is made clear in the choice of his donations - they include among them support for changes in the law to criminalize non-heterosexuality (established OR perceived) up to and including making it a CAPITAL CRIME.   To date this has been applied to several African nations, but it is entirely reasonable to conclude that if Mr. Cathy is ACTIVELY promoting the death penalty in Kenya and Uganda, that he would be also inclined to support such in the United States.

At the very LEAST, it is imperative that my own resources are not used in any way to enable Mr. Cathy's lest that my own resources are used to harm me or people like me.   Therefore, a general boycott of Chick-Fil-A is absolutely necessary, not to mention a public outcry against his actions, informing others about the situation, and issues a general call for support to apply pressure to have these practices changed.

With all of this disclosure, any continued support of Chick-Fil-A either happens because the supporter AGREES with Mr. Cathy's position, or is too weak-willed to select one of the competitors to Chick-Fil-A.   No one is forced to patronize them.   Choosing NOT to patronize them in no way limits Mr. Cathy's freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or ability to act upon either, claims to the contrary are simply fallacious.

So - go and enjoy your hate-filled chicken if you desire.   I hope you won't because you'll basically be sending the message that any support/love/etc. you have for me is surpassed by your inability to distance yourself from someone who seeks to harm me.   Like it or not - this is what it comes to - this is where I draw MY line.   Whose side do you choose to be on?

Dream: I'm the King of Zombies

Last night I had a series of dreams that were - for me - amazing.   First I'm rarely IN my dreams, and second I can almost NEVER remember them when I wake up.

Clearly this dream was influenced by recent TV watching, in particular "It" and "Waiting".

ANYway to the dream (as far as I can remember it).

It starts out with me on break from work walking over to a local department/hardware store (sort of like a Home Depot in that I associated the color "orange" with it, but it wasn't any Home Depot I had ever been to  IRL.   I go in through the back/loading dock area, to use the bathroom there (I can only guess that this is because there's no bathroom where I work).   When I come out there's a guy (apparently played by Justin Long) arguing with a customer.  He sees me and mistakes me for another employee of the dream-Home Depot.   He's really nasty about it too.   Apparently he had called for "backup" to deal with this customer and thought I was a manager or something.    So, I tell him I'd be happy to go find the manager and bring him to the situation.

I go get the manager (played by ??) and he comes over to defuse the situation apologizing for the employee, etc. to me.   SOMEHOW this gets into a discussion of patterns of behavior and my wondering if there might be some cause that could be pinpointed.   SOMEHOW I end up with a chart showing that yes - employees somehow have more "incidents" on warmer days, and offer (for a price) to do some consulting for him to see if I can help work out solutions, etc.   He says he'll get back to me.

OK - so I'm leaving (after some time) and going back through the delivery area, the manager comes running in with a box, opens an incinerator and is trying to jam it through the door.   Apparently the box has some batteries in it that are behaving strangely and he's trying to destroy them.

(I can't remember if there's anything else at THIS point...  cut to...)

There's an Asian lady examining some batteries with some gadget saying "See - this is one of the infected ones - you can tell because it's glowing blue and my (gadget name) is really pegged."

SOMEHOW this relates to zombies.   (There's another gap in memory, but somehow we determine that people are being turned into zombies because of exposure to the batteries, but no one we've met so far is infected.)  

Now a guy runs in and say "you should see what's going on outside!" - we go outside (thereby obeying the rule of every monster movie where you - for whatever stupidity - go TOWARDS the problem instead of running for your lives) and there are all these people lying on the ground looking rather zombie-like.   Somehow (another memory gap) we vanquish them, and save the day.

Yay.

We go back into the warehouse area and talk about this when a bunch of zombies attack (they're being chased by soldiers with automatic weapons).   There's your cinematic firefight and at the end there's a lot of dead zombies, and other people who we decide must have also been zombies, and the credits (literally) roll.

At the END of the credits there's that "scene the add in to make sure people sit through the credits" but it's really a sequel that picks up just where the first film left off.   Now - for some reason - I'm being played by Lance Henriksen (I swear - he's in EVERYTHING), and there's this great effect where we go back in time (through a quick succession of cascading images) to a few weeks ago.

NOW I'm in the store in the employee area sitting there while some woman is trying to give me a back rub.  I refuse.  Turns out she's the girlfriend of the guy at the beginning of the story, is in a rock band with her friend (I get the impression she's bisexual), and I notice she has a cut on her arm.   This bothers me.

We flash further back and discover that she cut herself on a broken glass while we're all at their apartment discussing a concert they just gave (that I was at).

Now we flash forward through several sequences - all between "now" and the beginning of the first movie where it's revealed that it's not zombies per se, but more of a "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and I am revealed to be the "king zombie/snatcher" setting things up for the first movie whose sequel is a prequel and presumably going to #3 in the series which is a real sequel.

Weird.

The last part was VERY sped up (which is why I can't remember details) and by this time I have realized that I'm dreaming.   It didn't help that Tammy decided to jump on the bed from the spiral staircase to get momentum to attack Chloe (I think she's feeling neglected by her sister lately) which was a little jarring.    Just when I went BACK to sleep a police siren went by so my dream state and awake state started to blur and I couldn't quite tell if the dream was a dream or memory.   I considered getting up to tell Den about it, but I was briefly concerned that I'd discover that he became a zombie, realized I REALLY had to pee, and then decided that I would just have to deal with the consequences of a zombified Den if I had to.

Fortunately he was up watching TV and I got to tell him all about this, although I had forgotten many of the detail by that point.

That's too bad - I think it would've made a decent film trilogy, though not by SyFy.   They screw everything up, and I'd've ended up being played by Barry Williams or something.

Observing the Train Gang

I have found myself in the situation where I get to observe a group of primates in their native environment.    It's interesting because a) they're a type of group with whom I don't normally associate; b) I'm a captive audience; c) as the observer I cannot directly interact with them because that would affect the experiment (which has interesting consequences, see below); and d) it passes the time.

What is this sociological test tube?    The commute home on the train.

There's a "pack" of people who ride together whose long-term ritual has led them to feel they are somehow "privileged patrons" of their own making (i.e., "regulars with an attitude").    As you can expect, this leads to very interesting interactions with the other apparently "unprivileged patrons" and gives rise to all sorts of episodes.

So, I've decided to chronicle them.   I won't name names - partly because I haven't bothered to learn them, and it's probably better (not to mention safer) to just use indirect descriptions.

So where to begin - well, we can start with a general description of "the pack".

There are about 6-10 of them on most days.   Most are female aside from one male (who is almost certainly gay), some transit personnel, and a few far-lower-ranked males (who mostly don't interact - they're generally "hangers-on" and so far haven't contributed anything interesting to the observations).

There's a weird ritual around actually getting on the train:  specifically, we're not allowed to board until the announcement is made to do so (about 10 minutes before departure), probably owing to some security policy.   This is annoying because there's about 400 people on the train when it leaves on any given day.    Quite a few of the regular commuters play the game of trying to guess which track will be the right one (it varies considerably among 10 tracks).   So there's generally three "waves" of a rush from the station to the correct platform:  1) people who have "inside information" (the theory from talking to other regulars is that someone knows someone who has dispatch information and they get a text when the track is assigned) who try to queue up at the doors of the cars as soon as possible (about 15 minutes ahead of departure);  2) people who know one of the conductors who then follow him when he gets on the train (also about 15 minutes ahead of departure - sometimes this happens without wave 1); and 3) everyone else who has been waiting for the official boarding announcement (about 10 minutes ahead of departure).   At the point of "wave 3" everyone can board, so the people who are part of waves 1 and 2 have an advantage to getting seats - and especially those people who feel they must have "their" seat on every trip.

Typically I'm in the first wave because one of the alpha females is one of the recipients of the aforementioned "inside information".   When I first started riding in their presence, I made a comment to this effect to the alpha female and it was vehemently DENIED - however, on subsequent observations, I have determined that this precisely the case, and apparently I was "not to be aware" of the special arrangement.   Many days I can anticipate which track our train will be on without her passive assistance; other days I end up being part of "wave 2".    The consequence is that I am usually in line at the car entrance ahead of "wave 3" so I get to observe the pre-boarding interactions.

Now - people line up somewhat disorderly at the car doors, but there's a _general_ sense of "first come first aboard".   Not for the Train Gang, of course.   Typically one or more of them are at the head of the line (being in wave 1), but as others arrive they - without fail - "slide into" the line at the front with their companions.    Presumably this so they have first choice of seating, and when boarding commences, politeness or courtesy be damned.    They tend to take up the seats at the end of the car (closest to the entry point) but since the actual train configuration changes daily (depending on which cars are where), the whole idea of "my seat" doesn't strictly apply.    (This is good because it avoids aggravation, but eliminates one obvious set of experiments and/or observations.  C'est la vie.)

Since I'm usually boarding after them (because I don't want to be knocked over in the rush to get into the car before everyone else), I take whatever seat is near the door (because that's where I want to sit anyway) without getting underfoot.   Typically I'm right on the periphery where I can observe "the gang".

That's the setup.

Specific "episodes" to follow (both as they happen and recollections).

Time

Some time ago (ha ha ha) - I was thinking about time and how to properly reference it
in the situation where you have a time line of events that do not share either a specificity of WHEN the event happened, nor HOW LONG the event took place.    Why?   Because time lines all suffer from this problem (esp. in a database environment): typically you store a time stamp at some pre-considered resolution (day or minute or second) where the actual set of time line events might not work with that resolution (e.g., "Summer 1864").

Basically you need three things:

    1) A base timestamp
    2) A sense of the fuzziness of that timestamp – it's "granularity"
    3) A sense of the duration of the event – also granular

Done this way, the three things have the following properties:

1)  The base time stamp

It's set at the precision of the database holding it.
Depending on the granularity, you can zero out everything "too fine to be known".
What I mean by that is that the convention can be:

     a) Sep. 11, 2001 9:34 AM --->   2001-Sep-11 09:34:00
     b) Sep. 11, 2001 9:34:21 AM ---> 2001-Sep-11 09:34:21
     c) Sep. 11, 2001 09:34:21.84743 --- might need the 0.84743 to be in a separate field
            unless time stamps in the DB support fractional seconds.   If you didn't use MySQL's
            TIMESTAMP and instead did a FLOAT based upon some root epoch, then you'd have
            SOMEWHAT arbitrary precision (which is how the iPhone does it - kinda)
    d) Sep. 11, 2001  about 9 AM ---> 2001-Sep-11 09:00:00
    e) Early Sep. 2001 ---> 2001-Sep-01 00:00:00 (or another date if you can make a better "guess")
    f) 1943 ---> 1943-Jan-01 00:00:00

And so on.    Yes, that means that something that ACTUALLY happened in July of 1943, but listed
as just 1943 get plunked in January... but if we KNOW that's it's July we can shift it to 1943-07-01
because our "fuzziness" has decreased...

It can be an OFFSET from another time.   So, anything that's like "10 minutes AFTER..." would be
whatever the time of the other event "plus" 10 minutes with the understanding that the
resultant fuzziness is the WORSE of the two.    "5/16/2011 5:16:32 PM plus '10 miniutes'
becomes 5/16/2011 5:26 PM"

-----

2) The granularity says "how far along the base time stamp should I read it"?
In other words, "I know that the DB needs a point of time, but I realize that the
timestamp might not be that precise..."

     This can be established with a enumerated listing (not a set!), e.g.:
            sub-second
            second
            minute
            hour
            ...
            month
            year
            decade
            century
            ...
            eon

        or, even something numeric  (1000 days) I suppose.

    So the previous examples have the following fuzziness JUST based on the way they're presented...
            a) minute
            b) second
            c) sub-second
            d) hour
            e) day?  week?   month? - needs more context

3) Finally, there's the duration  - this is a "delta" time stamp that ALSO has a granularity

      It's measured from the base time explicit, implicit, or calculated.

        It can be ZERO or NULL – meaning that it's not relevant, or perhaps not really known.   If you think
        about it NO "real" event has zero duration, so it's OK to use that to represent narratives
        that don't explicitly refer to any duration of the event.  However, as you'll see, one can
        frequently be inferred from the narrative...

        So if:

            a) the base time is when the tower fell, it COULD have a duration giving the sense
                of how long it took to fall;
            b) could be zero which we'd take to mean 'that's when the perspective started/happened'
            c) COULD BE NEGATIVE – which we'd take to mean "this describes things leading UP TO the event"
                    (I don't expect we'd use this but it's an intriguing concept for dealing with cause/effect perspectives!)

    Think of it as a way to relate things "WHILE" something happened.


So if you tag perspectives this way, you can relate them on a common time line that's as fuzzy as it
needs to be, AND as fuzzy as it has to be because of the reality of the narrative.   This makes sense
because that's how relate to time in narratives ALL THE TIME!    So, it's a 3-tuple (when, fuzziness, duration).

Examples:

"Last week, I went shopping, and..."   (you have a sense of an offset from "now" BACK a few days, but
    not quite sure WHICH day   = (Now minus a week, days, null or something depending on the rest of the narrative)

"This picture of my grandmother is from around 1914..."  (1914, years, irrelevant?  depends on the narrative, I suppose)

"Ten minutes after the tower fell, there was an explosion..."   (2001-09-11 18:34:42 + ~10 minutes = 2001-09-11-18:44:00, minutes, minutes)

"In the 1950's the culture..."  (1950, decade, 10 years)

"In the Paleozoic era..." (Now minus 542 million years, eon, 291 million years)...

As you can see, it covers almost everything.

As a concept you could also have a "NULL base" that could be used to describe things on a time line that
do not necessarily require a specific time to happen, e.g.:

"At 13 weeks of development, the fetus..."   (None + 13 weeks, days, days?)
(which technically makes the first elements a 2-tuple of it's own...)...

I love to write --- why is this so damned hard?

I love to write.   I freak out my co-workers because I can turn around a report from scratch, etc. in minutes instead of days (which has been handy for some in the final stages of proposal writing).  

But when it comes to BLOGs I can't seem to get the momentum going to stay on track.   I've started several times on topics of interest (bowling, politics, etc.) and all end up floundering (like this one) for months on end until I rediscover it (as I did this one today) and wonder "why didn't I keep up with this?"


What to do...  I suppose I could make it my 2012 resolution.

Where I have been

Well, anyone who knows me knows that my partner passed away in 2008.

I'm just getting back to this.