Better than air guitar

Earlier this week the Google Doodle was a strummable guitar, in honor of Les Paul’s 96^th birthday. It was a hoot.

As, apparently, hundreds of millions of people around the world agreed, since someone has calculated that companies have lost $268M in lost productivity from people strumming instead of spreadsheeting. (The calculation can be found here.)

Someone at Google has just sighed, “Ah, my work here is done.”

Fishy in SF

I love living in the shadow of San Francisco; there’s almost always something going on there that boggles the mind.

Most recently—that I know of—is the Board of Supervisors are considering a ban on the sale of pets within the city/county. Down to and including fish.

Don’t get me wrong—I think anyone involved with puppy and kitten mills should be eviscerated in the village square on market day pour encourager les autres. And I guess if there are gerbil mills and guppy mills we ought to add those people to the list, as well.

It just seems kind of snooty for a city to basically declare all pet sales strenglich verboten. The designer dog crowd will have to drive to San Mateo to get their labradoodles and pocket beagles.

And I wonder whether this covers the sale of ornamental koi for backyard ponds. Because that’s going to piss off a lot of folks in Larry Ellison’s neighborhood.

Gay girls in Damascus & elsewhere

It’s a wild, weird web out there; as if we didn’t already know.

As of this writing, two very high-profile web celebs, apparently viewed as spokeswomen for their constituency—lesbians—were, um, exposed as being men.

It seems that Gay Girl in Damascus is neither gay, female nor Syrian. He’s a middle-aged American man living in Edinburgh who thought that he’d be somehow more authentic if he gave himself the persona of Armina Araf for blogging purposes. He used the photograph of a friend for his dating site—without her knowledge—to enhance his credibility.

And Paula Brooks, editor of the lesbian news site LezGetReal, is in fact a 58-year-old construction worker retired from the Air Force. He used his wife’s name as nom de blog.

Both Tom MacMaster (AKA Gay Girl in Damascus) and Bill Graber (AKA Paula Brooks) have professed themselves shocked and chagrinned at the consternation that their fabrications have caused. Because they didn’t mean to deceive anyone, really. They just…enhanced their real personalities by creating online personas that were the antithesis of their sad, middle-aged white guy lives.

MacMaster’s hoax has had serious real-life repercussions, as when he let it be known that Armina was taken up in the Assad government’s repressive measures. Real people were risking real harm to themselves attempting to find out what had happened to Armina. MacMaster insists he meant no harm, though, so that’s alright.

Leaving aside the basically pathetic idea of 40- and 50-something men developing elaborate anything-but-me “lives” to present to the world in a format where they’re unlikely to actually, you know, meet anyone—it is, after all, only an extension of claiming the house you have for sale has 1500sf (which would be counting the garage, patio and front porch) or that you’re a 38-year-old stockbroker who keeps in shape by running marathons (when you’re 46, unemployed and can barely waddle to the doughnut shop)—I find it interesting that they have to go to the utter extremes of fakery to support their net-cred. 

Did they think it would be easier to establish bona fides by representing themselves to be experts in lifestyles, issues and geographies completely alien to them, rather than pretending to be chess masters or breeders of thoroughbreds or organic chemists working on genetically engineered radishes? They couldn't just say they collect Bordeaux futures? They had to be experts on the lesbian lifestyle?


No, faking chess mastery, horse sense or agronomy would take some sort of, you know, knowledge. But apparently pretending to be a person of a different gender, with a different sexual orientation, in a different continent--well, anyone can do that convincingly. 

They’re astonished that their deceit blew up on them. I’m astonished that they thought completely fabrication was their only road to authenticity.

Well, as Jean Giraudoux said: Sincerity is everything; once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Slimebags on a plane

There are just so many ways to go with this story about a Delta flight turning back to the gate to eject a passenger who engaged in conversational cursing over the delay in departure. A few thoughts, in no particular order.

First: if airlines are going to toss off any passenger who curses about a plane being late, there’s going to be a whole lot more room on flights in the future.

Second: aircraft are such cramped environments, it’s bad enough that you are forced to listen to your seatmate’s banalities without having his extremely limited and repetitive vocabulary imposed on you. Any more, it’s like being on a bus in the barrio without possibility of getting off at the next corner.

Third: The flight was already late taking off and someone in command made the decision to turn back to the gate, engage airport police, haul the passenger’s ass off that plane, and wait for clearance and a slot to take off? What’s up with that?

Fourth: The offending/offensive passenger is from Brooklyn. And evidently he thinks “being from Brooklyn” is a get-out-of-jail-free-card for being a jerk. Seriously? The “I-was-raised-by-ignorant-yahoos” defense? Does his mother know about this?

Fifth: He’d been to a wedding at the weekend and claims he wasn’t drunk, just hungover. Like that makes his behavior somehow less reprehensible. BTW, he picks this kind of nit and yet isn’t a lawyer.

Sixth: He’s contemplating suing the airline. Oh, of course he is.

Saint Anthony Day

Saint Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of the lost, of the pregnant and of travelers; today is his feast day. And today I’m thinking about my BFF, her sons and her grandson.

A couple of months ago, on what would have been her youngest son Anthony’s 28^th birthday, my friend Leilah learned that the baby her eldest son and his wife were expecting was a boy. Juan and Elsa decided to name him Anthony Daniel, after the baby’s uncle.

Anthony died five years ago after a great and terrible struggle with brain cancer. He was a bright creature, a gifted photographer and a joy to pretty much everyone he came into contact with.

Anthony was born with health problems—my first meeting with him was when he was maybe three or four, getting off a plane with his mother and carrying the plastic cooler that contained his meds. But even then—while a bit shy in the new surroundings—he was just so self-possessed. Everything was interesting to him; he absorbed life-things like a beautiful brown-eyed sponge.

Although much of that was his force of character, I think a lot was also the utterly unconditional love Leilah gave him.

She gave the same to his older brothers. Juan and Joe started out with difficulty, too. Their birth family abused them and they came to Leilah with the sort of disruptive attitudes and behaviors you’d expect. Leilah never gave up on them. Through gangs and drugs and learning disabilities, she was the best mom she could be to them.

And since her then-husband is and has always been a malignant narcissist, with all the steadfastness of a junkie on the make, pretty much all the stability the three boys had, they got from her.

The MN has a short attention span; he went through hobbies (and jobs) like a drunk through gin. Bow hunting, photography, Alfa Romeos—one minute the be-all and end-all; then next, so last-season. He was that way about being a father, too. He lost interest in Juan and Joe because being a parent to them as teen-agers required actual, you know, work. When he moved away from Oregon, he left them behind and took only Anthony with him.

Anthony somehow managed to not only survive living with MN, but to grow into a bright young man, a truly fine photographer, a percipient intellect. He recommended challenging novels for me to read, agreed that B&W was at the heart of photos and had an exuberant sense of humor.

But all this was cut short when he died of brain cancer, age 23.

I don’t suppose a mother ever recovers from that, and I won’t talk about the special circumstances surrounding Anthony’s death. Moreover, she’s had her own health issues to surmount in the past year. So her joy on 1 April at announcing that on that very day Juan and Elsa discovered they were going have a son and were going to name him after Anthony was inspiring. Her delight made me feel like life was better, 500 miles away.

But only 20 days later, baby Anthony was born via emergency Caesarean section, much, much too early. That infant did his very best to stay with his parents, trying to breathe on his own, but in the end he had to let go. He died in his parents’ arms, opening his eyes to see their loving faces.

Anthony would have been 28 on 1 April, but died five years ago. Little Anthony lived 13 days. Not long for either of them; not long enough for either of them. But young man or premature baby—they both gave it their all. There are no small souls in that family.

Perhaps Saint Anthony looked out for them; I don’t know. I do not believe they qualify as the lost; but perhaps as travelers they would have fallen under his purview.

But today, on Saint Anthony’s feast day, I’m remembering them—the young man I last saw, with his older brothers, playing like otters in a motel pool on a summer night in Portland 25 years ago, and the baby I only visualized in my prayers.