as I live a few more questions: August 2006

This must be Totally-Fucked-Up Church Decisions week or something. First the Sunday School teacher who gets fired because she's female, and now this gem from Brandon, Manitoba.
Deborah Boschman wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, criticizing the mayor and city councillors.

Several days later, she gets a letter from her pastor, Mike Davis of the Pentecostal church Bethel Christian Assembly, chastising her! (Her letter to the editor did not mention her affiliation with Bethel.).

In his letter of Christian love and forgiveness, Pastor Davis tells her, “Your actions are not consistent with the values of Bethel Christian Assembly and if you are not going to do anything about them I am asking you to consider attending another church...

”
Ms. Boschman says “I suppose I'm to clear everything through church leaders first -- to get permission to speak my personal opinion.”.

And she's gone looking for another church.
Smart woman. If it had been me, I'd have driven over to Pastor Mike's and Bette-Davis-bitchslapped some of the pompousness out of that asshole.

Hey, but that's just me.
UPDATE Aug. 24th: See comment below.

Perhaps there's another side to the story here.
Step 2. Once you've registered, you go to the Account Created screen (see left).

Click on the button with the big green arrow that says Download Last.fm . Follow the instructions link underneath the button if you need more help with installing the software.

Once the Last.fm software is installed on your PC or Mac or whatever it is you're using, just where you'll see a button that says 'Personal Tag Radio and a list of the 500 songs playing on my radio station (see right). Click on the Personal Tag Radio , et voila!

Commercial-free music selected for your listening pleasure by yours truly :-)
(Or, to make it ridiculously easy, after your software is installed, just . The Last.fm software will automatically load the station and begin playing.

)
Honestly, I don't even know why I bother.
Every so often I think I'm missing something and I sign back on to gay.com.

And every time I do, I get hit in the face with all the reasons why I left in the first place.
Tonight I decided to check it out again, updated my profile with a new pic (below) and launched into chat. To be immediately assailed by chatbots who want you to sign up for porno websites.

And then ignored by the people you used to chat with. And then realizing, once again, what a hollow, shallow place the chat room is, and that you haven't missed a God-damn thing in all the time you were offline.
One of my best friends, who is online a lot, chatted with me for a bit and agreed that it's bad in the chatroom.

I'm afraid I just can't understand why he hangs out on gay.com every evening for hours and hours. It seems to me all it does is get him more tired and depressed and cynical about the gay scene .

Meh, maybe I'll peek in again in 2007 sometime. Or 2008. The time I would be wasting online I'd rather put towards research for my book, or losing a few pounds at the gym, or adding tracks to my personal Last.

fm station, or evening out my suntan at the beach, or folding and putting away my laundry, or going for coffee or supper or a funny movie with a some friends.
Sometimes I wonder if it's the same over on the straight boards like lavalive or eharmony.
You simply CANNOT make this stuff up.

Mary Lambert, age 81, who has taught Sunday School at Watertown's First Baptist Church for 54 years, received a letter from her church leaders telling her she can no longer teach at the church, because she's a woman.
The letter quotes 1 Timothy 2:11 -14 of the New Testament: A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.

For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
Been a quiet weekend, spent most of it alone.

Actually made a dent on the dishes and laundry piling up around me. Somehow in the middle of folding, I got this urge to start taking pictures of myself.
Then I pulled out one of my folded sheets and draped it over my bedroom door, for that el-cheapo photo studio look ;-)
I usually don't like the way I look in photographs, but this one turned out well, I thought.

Hmmm...

on second thought, maybe I should do some suntanning WITHOUT my glasses...

(*goes to check this week's weather forecast*)
*sigh* Back to Mount Laundry...

Well, I'm late with the news, but the 11-year-old girl with the BIG voice has been declared the winner of the reality TV show Good for Bianca, she definitely deserves it.
And, since things move at Internet speed in today's society, , and (warning: video loads and runs immediately on entering website; keep your speakers down).
I hope and wish that she still has a chance to be a little girl in the midst of all this hoopla.

She's eleven years old, and has lots of time. I don't want her to land up like Judy Garland did, or (God forbid) Whitney Houston. And Jessica Simpson just makes me nauseous.

For a long time I had wanted to watch Long Day's Journey Into Night. I finally had my chance when it was on Turner Classic Movies several nights ago, when I taped it using the PVR feature in my new desktop PC.
Wow.

I can see why Katharine Hepburn wanted to do this role so badly that she took a pay cut.
What a haunting portrait of addiction and family dysfunction this play was. I might actually go do a bit of reading of comment and criticism of Eugene O'Neill's work, now that I've finally seen it.

And I won't erase it from my hard drive, just yet. I think I want to see it again.
A website that automatically checks and calculates which of Amazon's many stores (amazon.

com, amazon.ca in Canada, amazon.jp in Japan, amazon.

de in Germany) offers the best deal (factoring in current exchange rates and shipping)!
buying, which shows that it's actually cheaper to buy it from Amazon Japan than Amazon Canada. I've been looking for a tool like this for ages!

!
I haven't talked about this on the blog yet, as far as I know, but I am now on a 7-month research leave from work (one of the perks of working for a university where librarians are part of the faculty union).
During the next seven months, I will be researching Winnipeg's local queer history for a book I plan to write.

So today I'm in the office doing some preliminary literature searching through the online Winnipeg Free Press archives, when I come across the following article:

2005, p. a17 homosexual acts, said the Civil Marriage Act will solemnization if the bill becomes law, as expected next week. If I take the example of the ceremony of baptism, according to our canon law, we cannot accept the signatures of two fathers or two mothers as parents of an infant, Ouellet told the committee.

With a law that makes these unions official, situations of this will multiply and this threatens to disturb not life of our communities. Catholic church rules would not allow the baptism of same-sex couples, even if baptism, if we say no, it will be their choice of seeking baptism or not, said Prud'homme, a Catholic, said the church should not be free to refuse baptism It's a question of rules, but I consider a baby a gift of God, he said in If two mothers or two fathers come to baptize a baby, how can you turn down baptism? To me it's insane.

Even if they have to change the ruling of the baptism certificate. Who tells me that two mothers or two fathers cannot raise the child in the Catholic faith? So let me get this straight.

The Catholic Church is willing to fight tooth and nail to ensure that any baby conceived is born, and then you're willing to turn that same baby away from baptism (a step you consider essential to salvation), simply because the two people who sign the baptism certificate are the same sex???

And exactly WHAT does that have to do with how you treat this baby? You're punishing the baby for the partners' supposed sins !
It's not the same-sex couple who should be ashamed here, it's the Catholic church.

Write this asinine ruling underneath the one that forbids use of condoms in a full-blown global HIV/AIDS pandemic.
According to (link to video via youtube.com) and , reporter Seymour Hersh (the man who helped bring the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghirab to public light) has dropped a bombshell, claiming that the Bush administration actively planned for, encouraged, and abetted a very strong Israeli bombing of Hezbollah, as a sort of test bombing for an anticipated war against Iran.

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also If this is true then it is sickening indeed. How would you explain this to the all the people (including Canadians) who lost family members to Israeli bombs in southern Lebanon, and to all those Israelis whose lives have been disrupted and destroyed by Hezbollah rockets?

Sorry for the deaths and destruction of your homes, but the U.S. wants to run field tests before it engages Iran in a war.

At this point a predict a U.S.-Iran war is inevitable, and I suspect the reasons for entering the war will be as shaky as the ones put forward by the Bish administration before the U.

S.-Iraq war. At times like this I am grateful that I have not brought any children into this mad world.

Oh God, he's making a speech on CBC Newsworld now. The words just make you feel more secure, knowing that this asshat is in charge of Canada's national security??

. Like I said: asshat.
Frankly, the only emergency I can imagine Stockwell being prepared for is the Rapture.

P.S. O.

K., I will give Stocky a few points for obviously having spent some time on improving his French. In fact, his French is better party leadership.

On CBC Newsworld I am watching the funeral service for , the Canadian United Nations observer who was recently killed along with three others by an Israeli bombing in Lebanon.
I'm also browsing the Internet for the latest news on . So now you can't bring anything on-board with you, even a novel (I heard that they're making an exception for personal medications in a clear plastic bag, but that's it).

And you have to dump out all the liquids and gels you're carrying--everything from bottled water to baby's milk to perfume to toothpaste. They have to be discarded before they'll let you on the plane. Welcome to the new normal.

I'm just so glad I'm not stepping on a plane today.
I've decided to take this week off in order to get some badly-needed cleaning done around here (which is, of course, why I am sitting here composing a blog entry ;-) and thinking about all this madness that has enveloped us. I noticed elsewhere (via digg.

com) that (Source: news.com.au, Article from Agence France-Presse, Aug.

10th, 2006).

Centre and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
attacks that claimed nearly 3000 lives and shocked the world, 95 per month and the date of the attacks.

But when asked what year, 30 per cent could not give a correct answer.
Of that group, six per cent gave an earlier year, eight per cent gave a later year, and 16 per cent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.
64, and 47 per cent were older than 65, the poll shows.

1002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

And THAT piece of news is probably the scariest one I've read today.

The best place to stay on top of this breaking story? I have two:
1. (U.

K.-based Newsnow scans over 24,000 news sources, and the page refeshes itself every five minutes; this is the best place to stay perched for the latest news)
2.