The Peep Show is Over!

On Friday, the contractor, in a gesture of goodwill, put the vertical blinds back up over my sliding glass door.

See, when the contractor made the holes in my ceiling (to clean out the mold and find the cause of the leaks), he set up a "containment zone" (read: big area sectioned off with floor to ceiling plastic sheeting) around half my living room.  Including a small corner of my sliding glass door.  And, in order to make the zone completely contained (which was necessary when they were cleaning the mold out), the removed my vertical blinds so they could tape the plastic to the glass door.

Which was all well and good when this process was supposed to last a week or two.

We're into the fourth month now -- during which time my vertical blinds have been camped out on my floor, and nothing has been covering the sliding glass door.

This has wreaked havoc with my electric bill, as the air conditioner has to work extra hard to keep the room cool when there's big east-facing glass panels with nothing covering them.

Also, I've been flashing the neighbors. 

For the first couple weeks, I'd cover myself up when running across the hall to get to the shower.  (Yes, I use the guest shower rather than the one in the master bathroom.  I remodelled the guest bathroom and the shower in there has them body spray jets.)  After awhile, it just became too much trouble -- so I'd just streak across the hallway.

I figure if anyone went to the trouble of training some sort of observational device on my window, such that they'd look in, through the living room and down the hall, for the few seconds that I'd be visible flying across the hallway au naturel -- hey, they're welcome to the view.

But on Friday, the contractor dropped by, visiting each unit, and discussing with us what still has to be done.  He still can't put my ceiling back together as they haven't stopped the leaking yet.  But I asked if he could at least put the blinds back up, and he obliged, right then and there.

Sorry, Pasadena. 

How Many People Hate You?

I'm watching Without Prejudice, a show on Game Show Network that is more sociological experiment than game show.  The idea is that there are five people (the contestants), one of whom will win $25,000.  Then there are five other people (the panel) who will decide which one of them gets the money.  The panel eliminates people one by one, after learning a little bit about them.  The first one has to be eliminated based on a short introduction (name, age, appearance, home city).  After that, they learn a bit more (education, family life, job) and continue to narrow down the field.

One of the contestants this week is gay.  When this came out in the second round, two of the five panel members immediately expressed disapproval.  (They also expressed some fairly ignorant beliefs about homosexuals, but let's not go there right now.)  And it just sorta hit me -- like I hadn't noticed it before -- that, given this (not-exactly-random) sample of humanity, two out of five of them are instantly going to hate a homosexual just because he's guy.

It brought to mind an instance in High School, when we were talking about racism, and one of the Black students said that whenever she walks into a room, she knows that a certain percentage of the people in the room are going to hate her just for who she is.  She doesn't know who they are -- racists don't often clearly identify themselves -- but she knows she's got to deal with that every time she walks into a new situation. 

And it just hit me that, yeah, it's pretty much the same for gay people (although a person's orientation isn't necessarily as obvious as a person's racial background).  But gay men and lesbians just sorta have to deal with the fact that a certain percentage of people they meet -- given this TV show, probably a fairly high percentage -- are just gonna hate them for who they are.

I'm fairly lucky in that the culture in which I find myself living finds me -- at least on the surface -- to be relatively acceptable.  (You gotta really know me before you hate me.)  I've come across a little bit of hate based on my Jewishness, but it's been such a rare occurrence that I don't anticipate it in any social situation. 

But it's certainly depressing -- and extremely disappointing to me -- to reflect on how many Americans must have come to expect to be hated.

A Quick Little Controversial Post

A news headline on AOL reads:

"Students Killed Execution-Style"

Beneath it, it says:

"Lined Up Against Wall and Shot"

And beneath that:

"Victims Had No Criminal Records"

It's that last one that gives me pause.  I mean, when you tell me that students were killed execution-style (as opposed to, say, suspected mob members or drug dealers), I'm not likely to leap to the conclusion that they must have, y'know, had it coming.  I'm going to assume they're perfectly innocent victims of a perfectly horrible crime.  Because they're students. 

And I ask (politely, without any accusation at all) if perhaps maybe this bit about having no criminal records was included because the photos of the victims accompanying this story showed three African American teenagers.  And I wonder if the same disclaimer would have been included if the accompanying photo was of three white teens who (like the photos of the victims in this instance) have no gang tattoos or any other outward signs of potential criminal involvement.

And I go on to wonder that if the "No Criminal Records" statement was, in fact, inserted because of the race of the victims, was it inserted because of a racial prejudice of the writer of the article, or because of the writer's presumption that the article's readers hold that prejudice (and, whether the readers, in fact, do).

Either way, it feels ugly.

Unless, of course, there was nothing racial at all behind the inclusion of the subheadline, in which case, what does it say about me that I see racism where it doesn't exist?

Dodged the (really unpleasant) bullet

I eat at Souplantation often.

Like, at least twice a week often.

I figured I'd go tonight, after work.

I pull in the parking lot, get my little ticket, and see a sign saying "Souplantation is closed."

Takes me a few minutes to circle back around to the guy in the little booth (so I can leave the parking lot) and I ask him -- as I'm sure everyone else has -- why Souplantation is closed.

"A few people got food poisoning" he says.

That's a good reason.

I followed up on the internet.  Says my local news story "at least 30 customers got sick" after eating there over a three day period in late July.  Local news adds, "the infection has been identified as shigellosis, which causes severe diarrhea."

I followed up shigellosis on wikipedia, and found this cheerful entry.  It's one of your bacterial infections which is (as they delicately put it) "transmitted via the fecal-oral route" -- which loosely translates into "which one of you morons didn't wash your hands after pooping?"  Local news says the Souplanation "voluntarily closed, pending an investigation to track down the source of the bacteria."  Ya think?

Commercials

A while back, when I took the Warner Bros. backlot tour, I got a lesson in commercials.

A network (or show producers, I can't even remember which) doesn't sell commercials show by show.  They package them.  So, like, while everyone might want to buy commercial time in Grey's Anatomy, they won't be allowed to unless they also buy commercials in The Nine or whatever else bottoms out the ratings list.

This ran through my head last night, while I was watching ESPN.  Because, if it weren't for packaging, I can't imagine why I saw a commercial for "The Scooter Store" (geared toward mobility-impaired seniors on Medicare) during the X Games.

Project Buy Happiness Update

Well, the Santa Barbara portion of Project Buy Happiness has hit a bit of a snag.  I'm not sure whether this is because I mentioned throwing myself into my work -- but my work has decided to throw itself back on me.  It appears that I will spend this entire weekend buried in work.

I don't mind.  I've rarely had to work weekends for this job; when I do, I can do it at home; and there's a really good reason for me to do it this time.  So, no big.  But it does mean that, with the exception of a Drama Critics Circle meeting I can't get out of, I'll be pretty much hibernating in my condo with a big pile of transcript until Monday morning.  (If I'm really, really productive, I may allow myself a movie Saturday night.  Maybe.)  This will, however, mean I won't see any plays this weekend, so I'll be spending most other weekends in August playing catch-up with my six-shows-per-month obligation.  Which means I won't be able to take a whole weekend off to go to Santa Barbara, and if I do it at all, it'll have to be drive-up-early-and-drive-home-late all in one day.

On the other hand, I've made my first actual purchase in the attempt to buy myself happy.

One of these.  For them what's too lazy to click, that's a Pinnacle PCTV to Go HD Wireless ... thingie.  Which is a competitor of a Slingbox.  For them what don't know what a Slingbox is -- it's a device what takes the signal from your, say, cable box or DVR and slings it over to the internet, where you can watch (and control) it on any internet-connected PC.

Now, I'd been jonesing for a Slingbox for some time, but it was one of those purchases I decided to put off until I bought a new house -- largely because my current condo is not easily configured for a Slingbox.  Basically, you need your PC pretty much sitting next to your cable box to make this sucker work.  It can be done wirelessly, but one has to invest in additional equipment to accomplish this (either those plug-in adaptor things or a ... bridge, I think the term is.)  So I thought I'd hold off onthe Slingbox until I got a new house in which I might decide to put a cable box on the TV in my office -- or put a desk near the main TV -- or something else that might solve the problem.

And then, my pals on Woot came up with this Pinnacle PCTV to Go jobbie last night.  And while the Pinnacle item has all sorts of features to recommend it, the big one for me is that it (allegedly) just joins up with your wireless network.  In other words, I have everything I need for this sucker to work right out of the box on my current configuration.  And it would actually enable me to watch cable TV on my PC -- which would be quite nice, as all I've got in the office now is an old TV that buzzes strangely and tunes with rabbit ears.

AND the little bugger normally costs around $250, but Woot (in its one-day, one-item way) had it for $150, and I was all over it like ... Paris Hilton a Y-chromosome.

So ... Santa Barbara is up in the air -- but ... new toy!  new toy!

Dental Floss Conspiracy

You ever notice that the more you use dental floss -- the more those little spaces between your teeth expand -- the more you get stuff caught in there -- the more you need dental floss?

Pretty nifty for a product to make you need to use it more.  Kinda like crack.