en vacanes.

driving up to toronto tomorrow to sped easter weekend with his family. hopefully, it will be a nice little vacation. and unlike last time, i won't be the center of attention, which is even more promising.

today is being miserable. still cold. still no sun. what season is it again? i frigging hate march.

bah.

i wanted to post something interesting today, but i walked 1.7 miles home in the cold. and snow. and sleet. did i mention sleet? sleet stings when it hits you. and my gloves leaked. and my jeans are currently melting in the tub. and now it's dark. i'm going to have more tea.

too much of a good thing.

i've been thinking a lot about wine, recently. it's been the result, i think, of having seen Sideways and then having the oppurtunity to visit Moore Bros within a couple weeks of each other.

i don't want to call myself a wine snob, but the truth is that i like good wine, the same as i like good food. i can, with some proficiency, discuss tannin, acid, structure, fruit, nose, palate, and finish. i'm not so hip to terroir yet (besides the obvious, say, chablis), but then, terroir tends to be a mystical realm at best, open to all kinds of mythologies and superstitions (i'm not kidding. there is such a thing as holistic viticulture).

however, as i introduce him into the subtler aspects of wine, i find myself having to compare things that perhaps aren't ideal. i mean, when you compare one really good bottle of cabernet sauvignon with a really good bottle of red zinfandel, there's little room to explain one's antipathy towards the mass-produced, characterless merlot that floods the market. i'm finding myself having the odd urge to hop over to the state store (for those of you unfamiliar with the structure, the pennsylvania government regulates all sales of wine and liquor and runs their own retail outlets, some of which are better than others) and pick up a $5 bottle of merlot, and maybe another one of white zin, just so i have an example of the travesties that can be wreaked ;) it has come to me that when you can compare an estate-bottled, handcrafted vintage with a blended, industrial prduct, you can better explain not only why one should drink good wine, but what the qualities of good wine in fact are. just as you won't really understand why mcdonald's sucks if you never eat there (or conversely, if it's all you eat). and, you know, it probably won't end up being poured down the drain, because these wines are vinted specifically to be smooth and unchallenging and, above all, drinkable.

i think it might be an interesting experiment.

repercussions.

i haven't thought about it in a while, but one of the things i got really into when i was in university was what i came to call "cultural reverse engineering." what it is, essentially, is taking the productions of a culture (their arts, their laws, their language and so forth) and figuring out from those remains what was or was not important to that culture.

this caught my attention today. especially some of these quotes:

Serious, adult sexuality a turn-off for movie audiences... According to studio marketers, it tends to make them (especially men) uncomfortable. "If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn't sell," producer Peter Guber says. "If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. ... Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can't portray the sexual intimacy most people crave." ... "Today's audiences aren't comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex," producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. "If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers." ... "We are a Puritan society," Press says. "We'd rather watch it at home."

what does this say about our society? more specifically, what does that say about our relations with ourselves, with our sex partners, and our conceptualizations of gender?

it's getting even more dangerous.

"I want people to start thinking critically about how these images affect black women today," said Jennings, a Spelman College alumnae and now a law student in New York. "We're telling people [black women] are bitches and hos and sluts and not worthy of respect," she said. "And that's exactly how society is treating us."

later on in the article, they quote a gentleman from Black Entertainment Television telling women not to watch if they don't like it. but let's cut the relativistic marketing naïveté and think about this critically: if you're calling youself black entertainment, this implies if you're not entertained, you're not really black. and you're also implying that blacks are entertained by and construct a culture that values women by their sexual availability. if you'll sleep with a man, you're a ho. if you don't, you're a bitch. there is no room in this structure to respect a woman, and certainly no room to think about a woman's intellectual capabilities.

to back out further, when sex comedies and violent sex are the only way to entertain people, regardless of race, you're walking a very interesting line. especially when we take into consideration that men tend to make most of the visual entertainment and men are made most uncomfortable by depictions of mature sexual relations. if people never see adult, mature sexuality, where are they going to get their information from? especially among ever-increasing calls for "abstinence-only" sex education, which doesn't even discuss anatomy or biology, parents' increasing reluctance to talk to their kids about sex, and in fact, parents' apparent reluctance to engage in mature sexuality themselves. we're slowly heading back to ignorance, because ignorance is more comfortable. if we don't have to accept the emotion, the intimacy, the vulnerability inherent in sex, we don't have to worry about it.

sometimes it's important to see things that make us uncomfortable, if for no other reason than to sit down and think "why does this make me uncomfortable?" yes, sex is uncomfortable. but it is also a part of life. and it can be beautiful and fun and subtle and joyful, all without the inclusion of violence, tension, or fart jokes. to ignore the possibilities or dilute them is to do a disservice to ourselves, to those people that we could love, and most importantly, to our children and to our children's children, who will have to combat the myths and prejudices all over again.

happy equinox, happy anniversary.

today is the first day of spring (at least up here in the northern hemisphere). it is also, unusually, the exact same date it was last year, march 20. which also happens to be exactly one year since we went to the local pet shelter and got our kitty. awww.

it was a sunny saturday afternoon, very unlike today which is cold and rainy, and i had been doing some random looking on petfinder. i noticed there was a shelter less than a mile from our apartment. and we wanted a cat. we had been forced to give up our other one when the apartment complex we moved into insisted they had a $200 non-refundable pet deposit for cats, $300 for dogs. and plus, his cat loved his parents' house and yard so much, we felt it would be cruel to take her away from that and stick her in a little 1-bedroom apartment. so we didn't have a cat.

we had decided we were going to move out at the end of that year's lease anyway, so we went down to the shelter. we filled out an application for adopting and hung out in the cat room for a while. there was one very striking grey calico kitten who was only five months old and had been given up because her owners were moving (i ask you, who gets a cat, and then gives it up almost immediately? some people make me want to get violent). but she was very stressed out, probably because she was so striking-looking, and everyone was cooing at her and trying to touch her, which you're not allowed to do because it can spread disease between the animals.

and then over on the other side of the room, there was a little grey-tabby and white stray, who, when we paused beside his cage, walked up to the door and bonked his head into it, hard. "hello!" so when they brought us to a visiting room, we asked to see both cats. the grey-and-white one sat comfortably in our arms before hopping out and confidently exploring, always with a little twitch of the question mark tail. the little grey calico kitten jumped out of his arms immediately and went and hid in a corner. so the cats basically made the decision for us :) we took home the grey-tabby and white kitty, and he's been confidently exploring ever since, even if he is a bit of a brat sometimes. luckily, we also somehow managed to avoid alerting the management company, and they never came around to demand the deposit money.

he's sitting on my lap right now. such a soft kitty. we like our kitty.

in memoriam.

Andre Norton. 1912-2005.

a consistenently good, intelligent, imaginative writer, an author not too proud to collaborate and help. one of the first sf/f authors i ever read, along with tolkein and heinlein, so i suppose it's partly her fault (along with my dad, who gave them all to me :)

i would say "she will be missed," but she's written so much that i haven't read yet, even if there's something of a sadness to knowing that she won't write anymore. so instead, i will say that i hope her influence lives on.

whoops.

apparently, i'm not paying attention. how the hell did this slip by me? sniffle.

i'm also depressed to see that PA has such a small showing.

frankly, i'm all for government transparency. when people complain that you have to give up some privacy for security, i don't bother with the apocryphal ben franklin quote, but i say that it should work both ways. if i am forced to give up personal information and privacy under some misguided addiction to data-mining (come on folks, let's call it what it is), then i should be able to see what my government, the one that i elected and pay for, is doing with that information. taking my privacy and then giving me nothing back other than some handwaving and a vague promise of "security" is not an acceptable state of things.

privacy and security.

i'm not much of a tinfoil hat person (or at least i try not to be), but i've been known to have my alarmist moments. and, of course, i work in the data security industry which gives me a nice vantage point to see what the government et al are trying, in fact, to do with some of this technology. and i have a habit of following pretty closely things like the patriot act and so forth. i do believe that one need not give up one's privacy in order to obtain security.

which is why it mildly surprises me to not be bothered by the fact that my credit card company called me last night about the purchases i had made monday and ask if someone had obtained access to my card. they had all the information about all the money we had spent, and they just wanted to, you know, make sure that everything was cool.

the reason, i think, that i don't mind it is because, while i know that they have access to my purchase record, they do not take advantage of having that information. while you just know that the government, or insurance companies, or advertising companies, or whatever would love to get their hands on your info and make up a nice little cross-referenced database entry on you, the credit card company just...watches for fraud. you can opt out of any and all "data sharing" so that they don't sell your purchasing history to advertisers (see, now if i was wearing a tinfoil hat, i'd say that that's all bullshit and it all gets reported to the government anyway, but i can't wear tinfoil to work because of the static sensitivity of the test boards). actually, my credit card company probably hates me because i did opt out, and i pay my balance in full every month, so the only money they make off me are the merchants' fees, haha.

but anyway. this is, i think, one case where the privacy/security situation has come to a nice balance. they watch my account and call me up if something doesn't fit my purchasing habits, or raises a red flag in their statistical models, and they don't sell my purchase history or deluge me with unwanted and unneeded ads. and referencing a point i made last week (i think), they didn't ask me for my social security number or my mother's maiden name, or any of that crap. just my account number. privacy and security. who would have thought.

retail therapy.

we had a horrendous weekend. it was really bad. and then yesterday wasn't so great either. a series of bad days in a row does not a happy blogger make. so last night, instead of staying at home, we went out for dinner, and then we went to Buy Stuff. i had recently found the envelope that contained my christmas bonus (only 3 months late), and instead of doing something responsible with it, we went out and purchased...

my Very First Console.

yup. i've always been a PC gamer. mostly because my parents always said, "you don't need another reason to sit in front of the tv." so after 20 years of not being allowed to have a console, i purchased a silver nintendo gamecube. it seemed fairly fitting to me that my first console would be a nintendo. and since i get bored by shooting things, i'll take a game about really frigging cute sentient plants.

~3.14

happy pi day.

(does that mean the rest of the world celebrates it on 22 July? ;)